How Chinese artist Xu Beihong’s horse paintings have galloped through history

From auspicious horse-themed phrases and couplets to whether your luck is in, check out our Year of the Horse 2026 series to discover all you need to know about the coming Lunar New Year.\nIn Chinese culture, horses often symbolise power, vitality and ambition. But in the eyes of Xu Beihong – the father of modern Chinese art, who was especially revered for his horse paintings – the strong animal represented something solemn, persistent and even tragic.\nXu was born in 1895, after the end of the first Sino-Japanese war, and he witnessed intense changes in China throughout his lifetime, including the end of imperial China, Japanese aggression, World War II and the rise of the Communist Party. His work, therefore, reflected the country’s turbulent transformation in the first half of the 20th century.\nHis early family life, too, was one of turmoil. He grew up in rural Yixing, in Jiangsu province, where he helped out on the family farm. His father, a teacher, taught him calligraphy from the age of six and Chinese painting from the age of nine.\n\nDuring his teenage years, because of frequent flooding in his hometown, he often journeyed with his father to nearby counties, where they made a living by selling their paintings. Xu painted many naturalist subjects during this time.\nWhen Xu was 17, his father fell ill, which meant his family lost their primary income. As a result, Xu returned to Yixing to teach art in schools. His parents arranged a marriage for him, which he tried to resist by running away – to no avail.\nAt 18, he fathered his first son, who died of smallpox at the age of seven in the boy’s mother’s hometown. When Xu was 19, his father died, and – so it has been said – Xu had to borrow money for his burial from his father’s close friend.\nThese hardships in his formative years led to a name change that occurred sometime in the 1920s, from Shoukang, meaning longevity and health, to Beihong, meaning a sorrowful migratory goose.\nIn 1916, at 21, Xu enrolled in the French department at Shanghai’s Fudan University. He painted, made connections in the art circle and was soon invited to teach at Meiji University in Tokyo. In 1917, he went to Japan to study art.\n\nThis was a time of much unrest in China. In 1912, imperial rule ended and, for years after, the newly established Republic of China remained politically fragmented. Meanwhile, Japan asserted its dominance in parts of China, particularly in the northeast.\nXu was inspired by, and contributed to, the progressive New Culture Movement in China during the 1910s and 1920s.\nHe once said: “Of the traditional techniques, one should preserve the outstanding ones, inherit the disappearing ones, change the inadequate ones and infuse the adaptable Western techniques into one’s work.”\nBetween 1919 and 1927, he travelled to France, where he learned Western art techniques at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studied under notable painters such as Francois Flameng, Fernand Cormon and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret. He made oil paintings during this time and sketched extensively.\nHe travelled throughout western Europe, where he frequently visited local zoos, and his works were shown at the Salon – the official exhibition of art sponsored by the French government – in 1923 and 1927.\nWhen he returned to China, ink, colour and paper became his primary media. He became famed for a style that integrated Western academic realism – oil painting and life sketching – with traditional Chinese art.\n\nXu, unlike many Chinese artists who focused on imitating the old masters, embraced the French realism movement and Western methodology, adding real-life observations and expressions into his work and promoting a new and modernised form of Chinese art.\nOne of his highest-priced works, Put Down Your Whip, is a 1939 oil painting inspired by an anti-Japanese street drama performance. It auctioned for HK$72 million in 2007, a world record for a Chinese painting at the time.\nHowever, his prolific oeuvre is best known for his expressions of horses with swift brushstrokes and thick lines that embodied fuller, more urgent feelings.\nXu’s most famous ink-on-paper horse painting titles include: Galloping Horse, Running Horse, Standing Horse, The Three Stallions, Two Horses and Horse Drinking Water.\nHe sometimes repeated these titles, which created numerous versions of these paintings, but they have all been described as having different characteristics and personalities. Sometimes, it is a quiet dignity against a mostly barren backdrop; other times, they are bold and unrestrained, reflecting a certain defiance during social upheavals.\n\nA 1942 Running Horse sold for HK$7.2 million at Christie’s Hong Kong in November 2014, while a 1947 Galloping Horse fetched US$437,000 at Christie’s New York in September 2016.\nTwelve years ago, during the previous Year of the Horse, an exhibition of his work was held in Hong Kong. His son, Xu Qingping, said there was “an air of tragedy” that made the steeds’ lean, muscular and military bodies different from “the horses of today”.\nHe added that the horse paintings told of the difficult times in which his father lived, as the younger Xu also painted stallions, but his were more relaxed and “fat” than the horses his father painted.\nA lesser-known horse painting by Xu Beihong, titled Sick Horse (1941), “exuded an air of melancholy and dejection”, wrote a Post reporter in 2008.\nThe story goes that Loh Cheng Chuan, a collector of Chinese art who was a friend of Xu’s in Penang, Malaysia, was pondering the matters of old age and sickness and asked Xu to paint an ailing animal for him.\nXu agreed and accompanied the painting with a poem explaining that the weakened stallion was a metaphor for his own tough years in Europe as a struggling artist.\n\nKwok Kian Chow, the former director of the Singapore Art Museum, said in 2008 that Xu’s name was “one of the first names to be mentioned” when considering the topic of realism in Asian modern art, and that his style was “predicated on the ocular world as opposed to the literati tradition of text”.\nKwok added that Xu’s work had “an immense influence on the development of Chinese painting in the 20th century because he championed an expansive realism that included Romanticism and Expressionism”.\n