Xu Beihong's Horses: A Painter, a Nation, a Symbol

Xu Beihong's galloping horse is among the most reproduced images in Chinese art. It appears on calendars, schoolbook covers, banknotes, and tea-house walls. Most people who know one Chinese painting know this one. But the horse Xu actually painted was a wartime image — urgent, political, and far stranger than the souvenir version suggests.

A painter trained in two systems

Xu Beihong (1895–1953) is the bridge figure between classical Chinese painting and Western academic realism. He went to Paris on a state scholarship in 1919, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, drew anatomy from cadavers, and returned to China in 1927 carrying a thesis: Chinese painting needed structural anatomy, perspective, and chiaroscuro grafted onto its existing aesthetic of brush and ink.

His horses are the most successful demonstration of that thesis. The musculature is accurate — these are anatomical drawings of horses doing what horses do. But the rendering medium is ink on rice paper, not oil on canvas, and the brushwork retains the gestural urgency of classical Chinese painting. The horse's body is two or three loaded strokes, sweeping. The mane is dry-brushed in calligraphic flicks. It is academic anatomy delivered with a Tang-dynasty hand.

Why a horse, in 1939?

Xu's most famous horses date from the Second Sino-Japanese War. Galloping Horse (1941) was painted while Xu was raising money for war refugees. The Six Galloping Horses scroll dates from 1942, the year Xu was teaching in Chongqing under regular Japanese bombing.

In that context the horse is not a decorative motif. It is a national figure. The Chinese horse, charging, is a stand-in for the Chinese will to resist — for the nation in motion, alive, refusing to be broken. The ink-soaked, half-mad gallop is read explicitly as the spirit of a country at war.

That political reading was understood at the time. Xu's wartime horse paintings were sold and exhibited as fundraisers; the iconography was unambiguous to contemporary Chinese viewers. The horse later became a souvenir; in 1941 it was a recruitment poster.

How to read the brush

Xu's horses repay structural looking. Three things to check:

First, the silhouette. Xu's strongest horses are caught at the moment all four legs are off the ground — a pose impossible to draw from life and only confirmed by photography in the 1880s. Xu knew the photographs. The pose is itself a statement of modernity grafted onto a classical subject.

Second, the head. Xu paints the head with much smaller, more controlled strokes than the body. The contrast between the loose hindquarters and the sharply defined nostrils, eye, and ear is what makes the horse feel alive — the body is moving, but the head is alert.

Third, the mane and tail. These are pure calligraphy. They are painted with a dry brush, fast, and they carry the gestural energy that classical Chinese ink painting has always traded in. If the mane is decorative or static, the painting is by an imitator.

Why these prints still sell

Xu Beihong's galloping horse has the rare combination of being immediately legible to Western audiences who have never seen a Chinese ink painting, and historically loaded for Chinese audiences who know exactly what year and context produced it. That dual readability is rare, and it is why Xu's horses remain among the most-collected Chinese works internationally.

They are also among the most counterfeited. A Xu Beihong fake is usually identifiable by stiffness in the mane (calligraphic versus decorative), by the proportions of the head against the body, and by the seal — Xu used several but they are all documented and any unknown seal is a red flag. Buying through an authorised reproduction route, with a Certificate of Authenticity, removes these worries entirely.

Xu Beihong horse prints in the Kiln & Ink collection are hand-numbered giclée reproductions on archival rice paper, faithful to the masters' originals.