Zhou Tingxu was born into a prominent family on Gulangyu Island, Xiamen. He went to the United States to study painting in 1920 and later continued his education in France and the United Kingdom. He became the first foreign member of the Royal Society of British Artists. In the 1930s, Zhou visited Scotland several times to sketch the scenery of Ullapool, a seaside town on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. Summer Island is one of his finest sketches. It depicts a serene blue lake surrounded by mountains, with boats and houses scattered across the peninsula like colorful building blocks beneath a clear sky, where time seems to stand still. Influenced by his European and American artistic training, Zhou Tingxu’s works reveal his sensitivity to light, color, and form. At the same time, he captured the essence of natural scenery with precision and expressed it through a refined, generalized visual language—conveying both the harmony of following nature and the humanistic spirit and freehand tradition of Chinese art.