Horse's Gallop

By Peter Anthony

A 2002 23-millimeter brass Shanghai Mint medal that features a Xu Beihong galloping horse. Courtesy of Peter Anthony.

The office tower at 53 Xinjiekou North Street in Beijing is completely unremarkable – if you ignore the big, bronze statue of a handsome man in its courtyard. Dressed in a suit, armed with neither sword nor gun, he carries an artist’s palette in one hand and paintbrushes in the other. Stretched across the building behind him is a bright red banner that greets visitors to the art museum and reads: “‘If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you.’ Ernest Hemingway.”

Between the wars, artists, writers, the lucky, and the immensely lucky flocked to Paris. It was a time of, “Thousandfranc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab,” as an F. Scott Fitzgerald character reminisced.

The Chinese poet Xu Zhimo visited the city and wrote, “The stream of Paris is truly intoxicating, it captures your heart, captures your will, captures your forelimbs and your entire body; if you’ve never tasted a kiss, how can you ever imagine it?”

One young visitor wrote home, “There are hundreds of Chinese students here, and you bump into them quite frequently on the streets ... (however) those that are actually studying make up less than one-tenth (of them)!”

Many of the enrolled students came to study art, and only Paris would do. Two Chinese art pupils, sent to the city of Lyon, pleaded with their art professor in a letter that Angie Christine Chau uncovered, “We came to France especially to study European art; would it not be a great loss for us to not be able to study in Paris, the fine arts capital?”

In 1919, a Chinese government scholarship brought a 24-year-old art student to that capital city of art. Raised on a farm by his self-taught artist father, Xu Beihong began to draw and paint animals like chickens, horses, and cats by age six. Isolated in the countryside, the images printed on tobacco cards brought the boy some of his earliest exposures to art.

As happened to them too often, when floods killed the family’s crops father and son would trek together to the city to peddle their paintings. It was a touch-and-go battle with hunger, but the younger Xu was soon recognized as a talent. At 19, he moved to Shanghai where he found patrons who took him in and provided studio space – kindnesses that he never forgot.

A 2015 50 Yuan, 5 oz. silver coin features Xu Beihong’s The Foolish Old Man Removing the Mountain design. Courtesy of PCGS.

A 2015 quarter ounce gold 100 Yuan proof coin of magpies on a branch from a Xu Beihong painting. Courtesy of Peter Anthony.

By the time Xu arrived in France, he strongly believed that Chinese art was part of his country’s problems. Too reliant on classical sources, it needed to return to the direct study of nature. He dreamed of a Chinese Paintings Revolution. In Paris, he formed a league of overseas Chinese humanities students. The Heavenly Dog Club met to discuss art and politics. As one museum curator put it, “Xu was not the first to formulate the idea, but he was one of the first to offer a solution and a direction.”

Avant-garde art styles like Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism were all the rage in 1920s Paris art circles. While the hipster artists of the day sneered at his work, Xu denounced them as decadent. “Without the ability to represent the appearance there is no way an artist can grasp the essence,” he asserted. It was never his intent to Westernize Chinese painting, but to revitalize it, “to transform the foreign deity into a household goddess.” In France, the patriotism and nationalism he discovered in older French art, like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, inspired him.

Xu’s vision and superb painting skills met with success. One of his oil portraits was included in the 1923 French National Art Exhibition. Four years later, nine of his works were chosen for the 1927 National Exhibition. This recognition led to

The image of a cat on a Xu Beihong painting is the source for this 1995 10 Yuan, 27-gram, .925-fine silver coin. Courtesy of PCGS.

invitations from across Europe to showcase his merger of Chinese and Western art styles.

The Foolish Old Man Removing the Mountain is a good example of monumental Western style blended with Chinese meaning. A fable tells of an old man in Northern China. His view to the south was blocked by two great mountains. He told his family that these needed to be cleared away. As they hauled away rocks a passerby laughed at them. “How silly you all are. There are not enough of you to move these mountains.”

The old man retorted, “When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons and then their sons and grandsons until the task is done.” Mao Zedung used this story as a metaphor for the twin peaks that blocked China’s progress: feudalism and imperialism. He and Zhou Enlai liked Xu’s painting, too. After Japan invaded Manchuria, this painting became a symbol of Chinese perseverance and resistance.

Numismatists can enjoy their own version of this famous artwork. The Foolish Old Man Removing the Mountain design appears on a 2015 Chinese coin struck at the Shanghai Mint. Like the painting, this 50 Yuan proof coin is rectangular.

It measures 80 by 50 millimeters with a metallic content of five ounces of .999 silver. Coin designers Song Fei and Tian Xiaobin also added color to its surface and a gold frame around its edges. The opposite face of the coin displays the national emblem of the People’s Republic of China.

Another 2015 coin design with a traditional theme of Xu Beihong is, The Twin Laughing Deities of Harmony and Unity. Chinese lore has many much-loved fables about eight immortals who represent the rich, the poor, the noble, the humble, the old and young, and male and female. Each has their own iconic symbol, like the water lily and an opened gourd.

One popular tale, The Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea, tells how the group is invited to a faraway party to appreciate peony blooms. On the return journey, the Dragon King of the East Sea rises from the deep and stops them. Only after they reveal their talismans and vanquish the Dragon King can they continue home.

Two immortals appear in Xu’s painting The Twin Laughing Deities of Harmony and Unity. It graces a 10 Yuan proof .999-silver coin designed by Zhang Chenchen of the Nanjing

A 2015 1-ounce silver 10 Yuan proof coin that portrays two immortals from Chinese legend. Courtesy of Peter Anthony.

Mint. The coin weighs in at one ounce, has a 40-millimeter diameter, and 20,000 were produced by the Shanghai Mint.

After his graduation in Paris, the artist returned to China. Perhaps his feelings matched those of another visitor to Paris named Xu, the writer Xu Xu, “Lead me back to my home village, my hometown’s spring scenery so magnificent, full of wild green swaths of rice shoots.”

Back in his own land, Xu Beihong never wavered that Chinese art must be revolutionized through realism. This drew so much opposition that a rival group of Modernist artists, the Juelanshe, or Storm Society, was organized. When Xu learned that many of the entries in a major Shanghai exhibition would be Modernist, he withdrew his own submissions. That turned out to be a shrewd move. A year later it was his work that was being hailed as “the first voice of artistic revival.”

What artists want to do and what comes most naturally to them is not always the same thing. Even as Xu Beihong insisted on a realism-based art reformation of China, he continued to paint in traditional Chinese brush and ink. Ironically, it is these ink paintings that are today his best-known works. Xu’s interpretations of animals, particularly galloping horses painted with astonishing verve, are widely hailed as modern masterpieces.

As a farm boy, he was familiar with these subjects since his earliest childhood. Over time, he perfected a style to portray them. Flowing strokes that capture a horse’s gallop, or a cat as it slinks between trees, became a way to express his thoughts and feelings. A 1938 ink-and-color depiction of a lion and snake symbolizes China’s War of Resistance against Japan. A Chinese battle victory was celebrated by painting an exuberant horse.

Fittingly, the very first pair of Xu Beihong silver coins that China minted in 1995 show a cat and a horse. The opposite side of each coin features the artist’s portrait. Each coin contains 27 grams of .925-fine silver and is 38.8 millimeters in diameter. Mintage was only 8,000 sets of proofs. Zhao Qiang, who later designed many Panda coins, and Zhang Chunye were the coins’ designers at the Shanghai Mint.

That same year the Shanghai Mint struck 2,005 examples of an eight-gram gold coin that shows a strong and noble Xu Beihong lion on it. It is 91.6% fine gold and 23 millimeters round in dimension. Xiang Liming was its designer.

Much rarer is Lao Zi Atop An Ox, a 1995 five-ounce, .999-fine gold rendition of a Xu painting. Only 100 of these 60-millimeter-round coins designed by Ye Bolin were produced. A total of 305 five-ounce .999-silver strikings

Xu Beihiong's galloping horse paintings have become iconic for the spirit of China. On this 45-millimeter undated silverplated medal it is matched with the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai. Courtesy of Peter Anthony.

of the same design, but 70 millimeters in diameter, were minted as well.

The bronze statue with palette and brushes looks out at the world from near the entrance to the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum. Inside, these words are inscribed in stone, “Xu Beihong was a patriot, closely connected with the fate of his country. His innovative perspective; passion for assisting artistic talent; selfless morals; unwavering dedication to principle and ability to inspire people are all qualities of the Beihong spirit.”

When Xu Beihong passed away in 1953, no one who knew him should have been surprised that his entire artistic estate was left to the people of China. During the earlier war years when Japan occupied parts of China, the artist often traveled around South Asia to put on shows of his own works. All the proceeds from these sales went to help those in need back home.

Within the museum, the art exhibits begin on the second floor. While the most famous paintings in this house of art may be the galloping horses, the first work that comes into view is an immense oil version of The Foolish Old Man Removing the Mountain. Just as I approach it a little girl, perhaps four years old, runs up, turns, and grins as her mother snaps a photo. I think to myself, “Wouldn’t Xu Beihong also smile to see his legacy carried on by China’s sons and daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters?”

Peter Anthony is a PCGS consultant on modern Chinese coins and is the author of The Gold and Silver Panda Coin Buyer's Guide 3, a two-time Numismatic Literary Guild winner. He is also the publisher of China Pricepedia, a monthly journal and price guide for modern Chinese coinage.