Oil painting Art blog by Lucas Art

XU Beihong
Born :July 19, 1895(1895-07-19)Yixing, Jiangsu China
Died: September 26, 1953 (aged 58)d. He is famous oil painter as well as masters of Chinese ink painting in the 20th century.He was also regarded as one of the first to create monumental oil paintings with epic Chinese themes - a show of his high proficiency in an essential Western art technique.[

Xu Beihong was trained in the tradition of academism in Paris and was a painter of realism. He insisted profoundly on the training of sketch drawing and the precision of perspectives. He strongly believed the first objective of art was realism and real life was the source of art. The other major contribution he made was his effort to improve Chinese traditional painting skill by integrating with that of the western classical realism. On the other hand, he also tried to use the elements of person emotions of Chinese paintings in his oil paintings. Similar to Li Shutong, (1880-1942) a master of poet, calligraphy and painting, Xu Beihong's oil paintings were full of Chinese characteristics though he used the traditional western painting techniques. In their endeavor to master the western painting techniques, the two painters did not disregard their qualities as Chinese traditional scholars. In his paintings of Yugong Moves Mountains and ]iu Fang Gao, though painted with ink and Xuan paper, Xu used real persons as models and the paintings illustrated strong characteristics of academicism art. These two paintings had inspired a tremendous interest in the field of art which were so used to the scholar paintings. His paintings of galloping horses were also caused a similar response.

 Different to pet horses in Han Gan’s paintings of the Tang Dynasty, the horses under Xu Beihong’s brushes were very sporty and muscular. Obviously, he was a master of anatomy. Liu Haisu, who was one year younger than Xu Beihong, went to France in 1930s. The painters which interested him most were those of classical art with romantic spirit and post-impressionistic painters in the European history of fine art. He was enthusiastically imitating paintings of Titian, Rembrandt, Eug6ne Delacroix, van Gogh and Paul Cezanne. But he still showed his tolerance to embrace arts of different schools in his later paintings and teachings. Liu Haisu’s paintings completed after he came back to China were considered to be the masterpieces in Chinese oil painting history. His splash-ink and splash-color paintings were the final expression of his sensitivity to painting trends and his character of daring to be the first, rather than a return to the tradition of random scholar painting. Lin Fengmian learnt painting in the fine art schools in Dijon and Paris of France. He was influence by paintings of academism and impressionism and fauvism. He devoted all his life to find a way to integrate Chinese and western painting skills and all his paintings could be regarded as his experiments in this regard. Most of his paintings in his middle and later years were painted on Xuan paper, but none of them was painted only using the traditional scholar painting skill. Color and form had become the theme of his paintings and elements of western skills played important supporting roles. Almost each of his paintings used characteristic elements of Chinese paintings, such as maids of imperial palace, characters of drama, and elements of landscape and flower-and-bird paintings. The final results were Chinese ink paintings with western characteristics, an organic blend of Chinese calligraphic lines and western formalism.