Lot Essay
Fu Baoshi was born into a poor family in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. His original name was Fu Ruilin. He attended an old-style private school in 1911, and started to learn seal-carving, calligraphy and painting on his own. He greatly admired the Qing Dynasty artist Shitao. In 1925 he wrote The Origin and Development of Traditional Chinese Painting, and in 1926 he graduated from the No.1 Normal School of Nanchang, where he took up a position as teacher till 1931. In that period he published The Evolution of Traditional Chinese Painting. In 1933, Fu Baoshi went to Japan and majored in History of Oriental Art at the Research Institute of the Japanese Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Tokyo. There he also studied industrial art and wood carving, and continued studying seal-carving and traditional Chinese painting by himself. After his return to China in 1935, he began teaching and published a number of essays. In 1938 he began working for Guo Moruo and travelled to Hunan, Guangxi and Sichuan. During the 40's he held several exhibitions and made further study of Shitao's art. With the founding of the People's Republic of China 1949, he started creating a large number of paintings on themes taken from Mao Zedong's poems, and wrote some studies on Chinese landscape and figure painting. In 1957 he visited Romania and Czechoslovakia, and from 1960 to 1963 he travelled extensively throughout China, all the while collecting more material for his art, painting and publishing essays on landscape painting. He was very involved with the many associations and institutes of Chinese painting, calligraphy and seal-carving, and he was a great inspiration for his contemporaries and subsequent generations.