Xia Gui

or Hsia Kuei

(flourished 1195–1224, Qiantang, Zhejiang province, China) Chinese master of landscape painting. Xia served in the Imperial Painting Academy, and most sources agree that he followed the stylistic tradition of an earlier landscapist in the academy, Li Tang. Xia and his contemporary, Ma Yuan, were the most influential members of the academy, and a school of painting inspired by them came to be known as the Ma-Xia school. Most of Xia's surviving works are album leaves painted on silk. A typical work by him is exquisitely calculated and perfectly balanced, conveying with great precision a scene glimpsed through haze, sharply focused at a few points but obscured at others. Chinese writers spoke of his use of a “split brush” (i.e., the brush tip divided so as to make two or more strokes at once) in painting tree foliage and of his freehand drawing “without employing a ruler.” While his influence was considerable, it was only in modern times that he came to be recognized as one of the leading masters of Chinese landscape painting and one of art's great interpreters of nature.