Page 136 - 2020 November 30 Bonhams Rev. Richard Fabian Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy Hong Kong

XU BEIHONG (1895-1953)
Birth name Shoukang, he was a native of Yixing, Jiangsu Province. At
a young age, he learnt poetry, calligraphy and painting from his father
Xu Dazhang. In 1915, he met Kang Youwei and began practising
as his student in Shanghai. In 1919, he acquired a government
scholarship to study western painting in France at the Paris Higher
School of Fine Arts. He studied after Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret outside
school and stayed in Germany for over a year, learning under Arthur
Kampf and observing the local art scene. He returned to China in
1927 and successively taught at Shanghai Nanguo Academy of Art
and Art School of Beijing University. In 1946, he was the president of
the National Beijing Academy of Art. During the War of Resistance, he
went to Southeast Asia, to raise money with the sale of his paintings in
support of the Resistance. Meanwhile, he was invited to India to paint
for Tagore and Gandhi. Xu Beihong is the founder of modern Chinese
art education, who devoted his whole life to realistic painting and
advocating “to improve traditional Chinese painting” through the use
of Western painting techniques on composition, structure, light and
colour. His paintings of people, landscapes, flowers and birds were
fundamentally sketches. He used many Western sketching methods in
traditional Chinese figure paintings, and successively created various
famous works, such as Yugong Moving the Mountain, Jiufanggao and
Five Hundred Warriors of Tianheng. His paintings of horses were the
most highly acclaimed, as they integrated drawing techniques of East
and the West, and that resulting in a unique style of his own.
徐悲鴻（1895-1953）
原名壽康。江蘇宜興人。悲鴻幼承庭訓，隨父徐達章習詩文書畫。一
九一五年於上海得識康有為，執弟子禮。一九一九年攜夫人蔣碧薇官
費赴法，入讀巴黎高等美術學校，學習素描、油畫，課外師從達仰，
期間遊歷德國一年餘，求教於畫家康普，觀摩當地藝術。一九二七年
歸國，先後任教於上海南國藝術學院、北京大學藝術學院，並於一九
四六年擔任國立北平藝術專科學校校長。抗戰軍興，遠赴東南亞，於
新加坡、馬來西亞等地為抗戰義賣籌款。期間他應邀訪問印度，為泰
戈爾、甘地畫像。徐悲鴻乃中國現代美術教育的奠基人，一生致力於
推行寫實繪畫，提倡以西畫之造型結構、光線色彩「改良傳統中國
畫」。凡作人物、風景、花鳥，多對實物寫生。他在傳統人物畫創作
中大量運用西方素描的方法，先後創作了〈愚公移山〉、〈九方皋〉
、〈田橫五百士〉等一系列傳世名作。畫馬尤堪稱絕，融合中西技
法，自成面貌。

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