Fu Baoshi

Fu Baoshi was a Chinese painter and historian who was known as one of the "Four Greatest Historians" of Modern China, along with Lü Simian, Chen Yinke and Ch'ien Mu. He was born in Xinyu, Jiangxi, in 1904 and studied the Confucian classics in his youth. He failed to pass the civil service exams and became interested in Christianity, which he converted to in 1919. He went to Japan to study the History of Oriental Art in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1933. He translated many books from Japanese and carried out his own research. In painting itself, he brought Japanese visual elements to the Chinese ink painting tradition. He was the director of the Jiangsu Province Chinese Painting School and a vice-chairman of the Federation of Chinese Artists. He also taught in the Art Department of Central University (now Nanjing University) . Fu Baoshi's main academic contributions were in the fields of religious history, Yuan Dynasty history, textology and textual criticism. He was one of the pioneers of the study of Christianity in China, and published his influential book Research of Arkaguns in Yuan Dynasty in 1920, which explored the history of the Nestorian Christians in China. He also wrote extensively on the spread of Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism and Islam in China, as well as Buddhism, especially in the Qing Dynasty. He paid great attention to the collation and annotation of historical texts, such as the Code of Yuan Dynasty, the Ming History and the Qing History. He also wrote biographies of historical figures, such as Kublai Khan, Zheng He and Matteo Ricci. He was widely respected by his peers and students for his erudition and rigor . As well as painting landscapes, Fu Baoshi was also an accomplished painter of figures. His paintings of ancient Chinese figures from the 3rd and 4th centuries BC are particularly acclaimed. As a leader of the so-called New Chinese Painting Movement, which reformed traditional Chinese painting after 1949, Fu stood out from most of his contemporaries with his great passion for art, and his innovative brushwork and unique picture composition. He developed a reputation as a skilled figure painter, and was acclaimed as the leader of the New Chinese Painting Movement, which sought to reform traditional artistic styles in China. He was also the founder of the New Jinling School of Fine Arts, and an accomplished writer, producing many essays on the history of landscape painting ¹. Fu's reforms were followed by a group of artists in Nanjing where he then lived. He was recognized as the founder of the Nanjing-based New Jinling School of Fine Arts. The school included such important artists as Chen Zhifo (1896–1962), Qian Songyan (1898–1985), Song Wenzhi (1919–1999), Wei Zixi (1915–2002) and Ya Ming (1924–2002) . Fu Baoshi died of intracerebral hemorrhage in 1965, before the end of the Cultural Revolution. His former residence in Nanjing was turned into a memorial hall in 1987, which hosts a permanent exhibition of his artworks . He is considered to be one of the most important Chinese artists of the 20th century, and his works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Long Museum in Shanghai, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others .