The Horse That Galloped into History: The Art of Xu Beihong

In 1941, with Japanese forces occupying much of China and the nation in its darkest hour, Xu Beihong painted one of his most celebrated works: a single horse, galloping hard against an empty ground, neck extended, hooves barely touching the earth. He titled it simply Running Forward. It was not, he said, a painting of a horse. It was a painting of China.

Today, Xu Beihong's horses are among the most recognised images in the history of Chinese art — reproduced on posters, stamps, hotel lobbies, and living room walls across the world. But familiarity can dull perception. To truly see a Xu Beihong horse is to understand one of the most remarkable careers in twentieth-century art: a man who crossed the world twice, absorbed everything European painting had to teach, and returned to China to reinvent his own tradition.

A Childhood of Ink and Hardship

Xu Beihong was born in 1895 in Yixing, Jiangsu — a city known then, as now, for its purple-clay teapots rather than its painters. His father, Xu Dazhang, was an itinerant artist who earned little but taught his son everything: how to hold a brush, how to study nature, how to see. By the age of nine, Xu Beihong could copy classical scroll paintings with unsettling precision. By seventeen, he was teaching drawing to support his family after his father's early death.

Those early years of poverty left a permanent mark — both in his ferocious work ethic and in the subjects he would return to throughout his life. Horses, in classical Chinese iconography, symbolise vitality, freedom, and talent unrecognised by the world. It is not difficult to read autobiography into every galloping canvas.

Paris and the Academy

In 1919, sponsored by the Republican government, Xu Beihong arrived in Paris. He was twenty-four years old, spoke no French, and had never held an oil brush. What followed was eight years of the most intense artistic education of the era: study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, life drawing six days a week, visits to the Louvre where he copied Delacroix, Rubens, and Géricault with the same disciplined obsession he had once applied to classical Chinese scrolls.

He also travelled — to Germany, to Belgium, to Italy — always sketching, always studying. He was particularly drawn to Géricault's horses: the musculature, the tension, the sense of explosive energy barely contained. He spent weeks in front of The Raft of the Medusa, not for its drama but for its anatomy. He wanted to understand, bone by bone, how a body in motion actually looked.

“I went to Europe to steal its secrets,” he said later, only half joking. “And I brought them back to China.”

The Horse as Manifesto

When Xu Beihong returned to China in 1927, he brought with him a complete synthesis: the anatomical precision of European academic painting fused with the brush economy and spatial freedom of Chinese ink art. His horses were the proof of concept — animals rendered with structural accuracy that would satisfy any Western anatomist, yet executed with the gestural speed and tonal range that only a Chinese ink brush allows.

The key technical innovation was his use of wet ink on absorbent xuan paper. Where European artists controlled every mark, Xu Beihong learned to lean into the unpredictability of ink on unsized paper — allowing the brush to bleed and bloom, creating the impression of moving muscle and streaming mane in a way that oil paint, with its slow drying and opacity, simply cannot achieve. The horse, in his hands, became a vehicle for a kind of painting that had never quite existed before.

Legacy: The Museum and Beyond

Xu Beihong died in 1953, aged fifty-eight, at his desk in Beijing. He left behind a body of work — oils, ink paintings, and thousands of sketches — that is now housed primarily in the Xu Beihong Museum in Beijing, which his widow Liao Jingwen preserved and donated to the state.

His influence on subsequent generations of Chinese painters cannot be overstated. As the first president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he shaped the curriculum that trained virtually every significant Chinese artist of the mid-twentieth century. His insistence that rigorous draughtsmanship must underpin any form of painting — Eastern or Western — remains the founding principle of Chinese academic art education to this day.

But it is the horses that endure most powerfully in the popular imagination. Not because they are decorative — though they are — but because they carry within them a complete philosophy: that tradition and innovation are not opposites, that the greatest act of cultural loyalty is to bring your inheritance into honest dialogue with the wider world.

In that sense, every Xu Beihong horse is still galloping forward.