"Old House in Autumn"

After all of Baishi’s travels, he built a house and settled down in Beijing. He began writing poetry about and painting some of the mountains he saw. These paintings became a series of fifty landscape pictures known as Jie Shan Tu Juan.

It wasn’t until Baishi was in his mid-fifties that he was regarded as a mature painter. His lines in painting became sharper and the subject matter in his works changed from an animal-life base to a more plant-life base.

In his later years, he continued to make "later-year innovations", when many of his works depict mice, shrimp, or birds. In 1953 he was elected to the president of the Association of Chinese Artists.

On September 16, 1957, Qi died in Beijing at the venerable age of ninety-six.

Characteristics of Qi’s Works

Some of Qi's major influences include the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) painter Bada Shanren (or Zhu Da) and the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) artist Xu Wei.

Baishi had his own philosophy on painting which read: “In speech, use language that people can understand. In painting, depict things that people have seen”.