Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c11.s4.t3.44

v2.c11.s4.t3.44

Xu Beihong was born in Yi Xing county of Jiangsu province in July 1895, and died in Beijing in September 1953. His father was also an artist with whom Xu Beihong studied classic Chinese works and calligraphy at the early age of six, and Chinese painting when he was nine-years-old. In 1915, he moved to Shanghai, where he made a living out of commercial and private work, and then in 1917, travelled to Tokyo to study Arts. After a short duration in Japan, he returned to China in 1918 and began to teach at Peking University’s Arts School at the invitation of Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培). In the same year, he presented a paper, ‘*Methods to Reform Chinese painting*’, in which he urged the artists to preserve those traditional methods and amalgamate those elements of western painting with the Chinese ones. In 1919, Xu Beihong left for France for further studies of Art and Painting, while availing a government scholarship and also visited Germany to study under Arthur Kampf, President of the Berlin Academy of Art. His travels around Western Europe provided him the rare opportunity