(born July 19, 1895, Yixing, Jiangsu province, China—died Sept. 26, 1953, Beijing) Chinese artist and art educator. Xu became an itinerant professional painter in his early teens and an art teacher before reaching age 20. He first visited Shanghai in 1912, and over the next few years he studied Western-style painting.
In 1918 Xu traveled to Beiping (now Beijing), where he was appointed a teacher at the Beiping University's Art Research Association. During this period Xu began to teach that only the realist approach from recent Western painting could revive Chinese painting. After studying in Paris and Berlin, Xu held a large-scale, one-person exhibition in Shanghai in 1926 that firmly established his fame as a modern Chinese master. He was best known for his history paintings, portraits, and pictures of horses, cats, and other animals, and he was competent both in Western media and in the traditional Chinese ink-and-wash method. His rigorous and stylish illustrations of horses were especially highly acclaimed by Chinese critics and connoisseurs and helped gain him an international reputation. In 1927 Xu returned permanently to China, where he continued to teach.
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