A modern artist who transformed Chinese painting with his vivid portraits of history, horses, and wartime resistance
Horses have always been a common theme in Chinese ink painting, representing aspiration, ambition, and energy.
Under the brush of painter Xu Beihong (徐悲鸿), though, this noble animal became a symbol of national spirit and unity during a time of great division, the war-torn years of the 1930s and 1940s.
Xu is perhaps the most important name in modern Chinese art, but was born into an ordinary family in Jiangsu in 1895.
He learned traditional painting from his father at a young age. As a young man, Xu attended Shanghai’s Jesuit-run Aurora University and later became an instructor in Peking University, rubbing shoulders with writer Lu Xun, opera master Mei Lanfang, and other thinkers and artists of the time. But it was his study abroad at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, starting in 1919, and his subsequent eight years’ residence in Europe, that gave him a firm grasp of Western painting techniques and exposed Xu to the deep influence of French Realism.
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