Xu Beihong
Painter of horses and realism.
Xu Beihong studied in Paris and brought European anatomy and realism into Chinese ink painting. He headed the art academy in Beijing.
Xu Beihong was born in 1895 in Yixing in Jiangsu province. His father was a painter and teacher who gave him a basic training in ink painting and calligraphy. After his father's death he had to support the family early on by teaching and drawing. He moved to Shanghai and came into contact with reform-minded intellectuals.
In 1919 he travelled to Paris on a government scholarship and studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. He drew from the live model, copied in the Louvre and travelled in Europe, including to Berlin. He came to believe that Chinese painting had ossified in the copying of old masters and needed European realism, anatomy and observation.
After returning home in 1927 he became a leading teacher and sought to combine Western technique with Chinese materials. He painted large historical subjects in oil, such as Tian Heng and His Five Hundred Retainers, and in ink, such as The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains. He is nonetheless best known for his horses in ink, often galloping, in which he combines precise anatomy with swift, expressive brushstrokes. During the war against Japan he sold works in Southeast Asia and India to raise money for war victims.
After 1949 he became the first president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He died in 1953. His views on realism and drawing shaped Chinese art education for decades and were of great importance for socialist realism in China. There is a museum dedicated to him in Beijing.