Xu Beihong Zodiac Animals: The Twelve Paintings Explained

Xu Beihong's twelve zodiac animals: the three albums of 1939, 1945 and 1946, how he painted each creature from rat to pig, and what to look for in a set.

Take the smallest leaf first. A rat sits low on bare paper, its body a single wash of grey ink that darkens along the spine, its whiskers pulled out with the last few hairs of the brush, one eye a dot of black so dense it shines. Nothing else is on the sheet — no ground line, no grain to steal — and yet the animal is unmistakably alert, weight on the haunches, ready to go. It is the first of twelve, and it announces the terms of the whole set: an animal drawn by someone who has looked hard at the real thing, then set down in the fewest strokes the brush allows.

This guide walks you through what the twelve zodiac animals are and why they come in that order, why Xu Beihong of all painters was suited to the subject, the three complete albums he painted in 1939, 1945 and 1946, how each of the twelve leaves is built with the brush, and what a collector should look for in a set, whether as original leaves or as the reproductions most of us live with.

The twelve animals and their order

The Chinese zodiac, shengxiao (生肖, "birth likeness"), assigns an animal to each year of a twelve-year cycle. The order is fixed: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Each animal is paired with one of the twelve earthly branches, so the rat belongs to zi (子), the ox to chou (丑), the horse to wu (午) and so on. Combined with the ten heavenly stems, the branches make the sixty-year cycle in which Chinese painters have always dated their work — the system explained in our guide to reading ganzhi dates.

The animals are folk culture rather than high art. Before the twentieth century the zodiac appeared on tomb figurines, bronze mirrors, New Year prints and children's charms, not in the albums of literati painters, whose animals were the crane, the gibbon and the horse of the scholar's own allegories. A complete zodiac by a major ink painter is therefore a modern idea, and Xu Beihong took it seriously enough to paint the set three times.

Why Xu Beihong, of all painters

Xu Beihong (1895–1953) was born in Yixing, Jiangsu, the son of a local painter, and trained in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1919, where he learned the academic disciplines of anatomy, perspective and drawing from life. Back in China from 1927 he made those disciplines the foundation of a new art education, first at the university in Nanjing and after 1949 as the first president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His conviction, argued in our piece on Xu Beihong between East and West, was that Chinese painting would be renewed by looking harder at the world.

Animals were where the argument was won. His galloping horses, built on many hundreds of sketches from life, became the most recognisable image in modern Chinese art; the reasons are set out in our guide to the symbolism of Xu Beihong's galloping horses. He painted lions, roosters, cats, magpies, eagles, geese, oxen and goats with the same method: a structure understood from the skeleton outwards, then delivered in ink with the freedom of the xieyi tradition. A zodiac set is a test of exactly that range. Eleven of the twelve animals can be drawn from life. The twelfth, the dragon, cannot, and how a painter handles it tells you how much of his confidence comes from looking and how much from tradition.

Three albums: 1939, 1945 and 1946

Xu painted the twelve as a complete album three times, and the three sets differ in size, in mood and in what they were for.

1939. The earliest and smallest set, its leaves little more than ten centimetres across, painted in the years when Xu was touring Southeast Asia holding exhibitions and charity sales for the war effort at home. The handling is tight and studied, closer to the research sketch than to the performance piece: the rat's fur is drawn with visible fineness, the horse has the robust limbs and lifted head of his anatomical studies, and the dragon turns the light and shade of his Western training into relationships of black and white on the paper.
1945. A full-size album of leaves roughly a foot square, painted in the year his marriage to Jiang Biwei was dissolved and given to her as part of the settlement, together with a large number of other paintings, among them works by Qi Baishi from his own collection. Chinese critics read this set as the most subdued of the three, its animals still and inward.
1946. The liveliest set, painted for his student Zhang Qianying before she left to study in Europe. The ox stands rather than lies, the horse grazes with its head down, and the dog is a long-haired animal at rest — poses chosen for affection rather than grandeur.

None of the three was painted as stock for a dealer. One was a fundraising gesture, one a settlement, one a parting gift, which is a large part of why complete sets are so rare and so closely watched when they appear.

The twelve leaves, one by one

Every leaf of a zodiac set poses its own problem for the brush. What follows is what each animal demands and what to look at when you have a set in front of you.

Rat. The smallest animal and the hardest to make dignified. Xu gives it weight through the haunches and life through the whiskers and the single bright eye; look for fur drawn with a nearly dry brush over a wet wash.
Ox. Mass before anything else. The body is broad, wet strokes of grey, the horns and hooves added in dark ink when the wash has half dried; in the 1946 set the animal stands.
Tiger. The stripes are the trap: paint them too evenly and the animal becomes a rug. Look for irregular stripes and for paper left white at the belly and muzzle.
Rabbit. Soft-bodied, all fur and ear, drawn with a light, broken line, and often shown as a pair.
Dragon. The one animal without a model. Xu builds it in graded ink washes emerging from cloud, using tone rather than outline to give it volume.
Snake. A single line that must carry the whole animal. The test is whether the coil reads as a body with weight, not as a rope.
Horse. The signature subject, and in a zodiac set usually the quietest version of it: a standing or grazing animal rather than the charging herd, with the mane and tail flicked out in the fast, split strokes that every forger tries and few manage.
Goat. Look for dry, hairy strokes for the fleece against a wet nose and dark, slotted eyes.
Monkey. Fur again, on a body that has to be caught mid-gesture; the hands and face are drawn with a finer brush than the rest.
Rooster. One of Xu's favourite subjects outside the zodiac, an emblem of dawn and courage, with the comb in a touch of red and the tail feathers in long, decisive black strokes.
Dog. In the 1946 set a long-haired dog lying at ease, the fur suggested by dragging a nearly dry brush, the eye and nose in dense black.
Pig. The animal least often painted in the Chinese tradition, and one you will rarely see from Xu outside a zodiac set. Look for a heavy, low body in wet grey and a small, exact eye.

How the leaves are made

Xu's zodiac animals belong to xieyi (寫意, "writing the idea") painting: forms set down in a few loaded strokes rather than outlined and filled. What separates them from the many amateur zodiacs painted since is the skeleton underneath. The wash that makes a rat's back or an ox's flank is placed where the muscle is, and the darkest ink is reserved for the joints, eyes and hooves that carry the animal's weight. The difference between this and a decorative treatment is explained in our guide to xieyi and gongbi painting.

Colour is sparing. A rooster's comb, the pink of an ear, a warm wash under a monkey's face — otherwise the sets are ink on paper, which is why the quality of the ink tones matters so much. Hold a leaf, or a good reproduction of one, to the light and count the greys between the palest wash and the eye: in a genuine Xu there are many, and they were laid down wet into wet in a single sitting.

What the market looks for

Complete zodiac albums by Xu Beihong are rare, with three sets known, and the appearance of one at auction is an event. Far more common are single animal paintings — horses above all, then roosters, oxen, cats and magpies — and it is here that a private collector encounters the artist. Individual zodiac-subject paintings by Xu exist in quantity, and so do forgeries of them; the horse in particular is copied so often that a signature alone means little. Our Xu Beihong collector's guide sets out the periods, the subjects and the checks that matter.

Before buying any leaf said to come from a dispersed set, ask three questions. Do the size and the paper match the set it is claimed to belong to? Does the inscription fit — in a dedicated album the dedication is usually on a single leaf, with the rest signed briefly? And does the animal show the anatomical sense that the whole series depends on? A rat that is merely cute, or a horse whose legs do not bear its weight, is not Xu Beihong.

Common questions

Did Xu Beihong paint all twelve zodiac animals?

Yes. He painted the full set of twelve as a complete album three times, in 1939, 1945 and 1946, as well as many individual paintings of zodiac animals — horses, roosters, oxen and goats especially — throughout his career. The three albums differ in size and mood: the 1939 set is small and closely studied, the 1945 set is quiet and subdued, and the 1946 set is the most relaxed and lively.

When did Xu Beihong paint the Twelve Zodiac album?

The first in 1939, during his years of wartime charity exhibitions in Southeast Asia; the second in 1945, given to Jiang Biwei as part of their divorce settlement; the third in 1946, painted for his student Zhang Qianying before she went abroad to study. None was made as stock for sale.

What is the order of the Chinese zodiac animals?

Rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Each is tied to one of the twelve earthly branches, from zi to hai, and the cycle repeats every twelve years. A complete zodiac album is normally arranged in this order, beginning with the rat.

Which Xu Beihong animal is the most famous?

The horse, without question — the galloping horse in particular, painted from the 1930s onward as an image of national vigour. Within a zodiac set the horse is usually shown at rest, so the leaf to compare with the famous images is a quieter one, and the mane and tail strokes are the place to look.

Browse the collection

Kiln & Ink offers the twelve zodiac animals of Xu Beihong as limited-edition archival giclée reproductions, from the rat to the boar, each hand-numbered and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity, alongside his horses, magpies and cranes. See the Xu Beihong artist page or browse the full collection.