Qian Songyan
Qian Songyan was born in 1899 in Hushu, a small farming village near Yixing in the Jiangsu Province.
At the age of 8 he attended the private village school of his father Qian Shaoqi[2] and developed a strong interest in painting and calligraphy, in addition to his extreme talent in language arts.
In August 1918, at the age of 19, he was admitted to the Third Provincial College of Education in Wuxi, where he was tutored by famous artists such as Hu Tinglu and Wu Guandai and achieved excellent exam results.
In 1939 he moved into his newly renovated home and named his study “QiLu” and “Nan Guo Cao Tang”.
His personal and artistic life were greatly affected during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76), forcing him to abandon painting until 1972.
Occasionally he would talk to the writer Zhao Pei, another victim of the Cultural Revolution, while doing field work.
Soon after, in March of the same year, Qian Songyan was hospitalized due to swollen legs and a loss of appetite and was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
Although the college advised him to go to university or to study abroad, he rejected politely and went to Suzhou to teach Chinese language, history and painting.
After taking refuge in his hometown of Yixing for a year, he returned to Wuxi in 1938 and first taught at the university there until January 1941.
In the following years he was involved in several political organizations and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1954.
He showed two of his pictures at the 1st exhibition of Chinese paintings in Nanjing in 1956 which attracted the attention of all the art circles within the Jiangsu Province.
In November 1959, he traveled to the coastal city of Lianyungang together with a group of Chinese painters: Yu Tongfu, Song Wenzhi, Wei Zixi, and Zhang WenJjun.
There he created the large-format work entitled "Voyage of Thousands Sailing Boats" for the JiangSu Salon in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
The Jiangsu Chinese Painters Academy was officially established in March 1960, and Qian Songyan was appointed as director.
Another illustrated book “Selected Works by Qian Songyan” followed in August by the art publishing house in Wuxi.
This group included important painters such as Fu Baoshi, Yaming, Song Wenzhi and Wei Zixi.
After numerous revisions, he completed the painting Red Rock in October 1962, causing a sensation in the art world.
For six months, starting in August 1965, he traveled with his wife to various places in Shanxi and Jiangxi provinces as well as Beijing to make sketches.
[citation needed] After his return to Nanjing he joined the ranks of the Jiangsu Fine Arts and Culture Bureau.
In August he wrote the article “New Ways to Create New National Images from the Old” and published it on September 3, 1972, in the Guangming Daily.
During this time, he named his house on Zhongyang Lu as “Wan Shi Lou” (Unyielding stone chamber).
While there he created the colossal painting of the Dawn in the Jujube Garden for the Memorial Hall for Chairman Mao.
On October 15, 1979, his painting The Infinite Beauty of the Great Wall was given to French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing as a state gift.
He was elected honorary president, for a brief tenure, at the congress of the Jiangsu Chinese Artists Association.
In October, he wrote the foreword to the recently published book Occasional Exchanges in the Field - Dialogues with Comrade Qian Songyan by Zhao Pei, with whom he had spent time at the political rehabilitation facility.
From April to September 1982, he spent seven months working on the painting Spectacular Scenes from Lake Taihu, which he created for the Jiangsu Salon of the Great People’s Hall in Beijing.
When his health would allow him, he accompanied the team to many sites including Linggu Temple, MingXiaoling Mausoleum, and Mochou Lake.
Together with his portrait, his ashes were placed in a shrine, flanked by a melancholy poem:[3] A master of his time who understood both tradition and innovation.
In the years that followed, his works were met with increasing international interest and have been traded by well-known auction houses such as B. Sotheby’s[4] and Christie’s.
