Artist: Qian Songyan (September 11, 1899 - September 4, 1985)
The Tall Mountains and Long Rivers
Ink and color on paper, Yisebiao mount, Horizontal Axis
Painting (Sight): Length: 135 cm, Width: 67.5 cm
Dated: 1979
Signed/Seal(s): Signed, with Three seals

PROVENANCE:

These Important Paintings collection all originated from one prominent collector, spanning from Lot-95 to Lot-160 (Day 1), continuing from Lot-402 to Lot-456 (Day 2).

LOT NOTES:

Qian Songyan (September 11, 1899, in Yixing, Jiangsu Province; died September 4, 1985, in Nanjing) was a Chinese painter. He represents the “New Nanjing (Jinling) Art Style”. He was executive director of the Association of Chinese Artists, Honorary Chairman of the Jiangsu Branch of the Association of Chinese Artists, and President of the Jiangsu Academy of Chinese Painting.[2] In addition he was elected to be a representative in the National People’s Congress for many years. Qian Songyan was born in 1899 in Hushu, a small farming village near Yixing in the Jiangsu Province. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all scholars and socially recognized as teachers. 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. Often he wandered through painting mounting stores and antique stores to study paintings. After the 1911 Xinhai revolution, his father was appointed principal of Yangxiang’s First Elementary School. The school’s curriculum was not very challenging for Qian Songyan, so he dropped out and began an independent five-year study program, which split his time between practical work in the fields and studying the theory and techniques of traditional painting. At age 15, he created a painting with the hazy mountains of his hometown. During this time he created many works on village life and was soon known in the region as “The Little Painter". At 15, he left home and attended the Third Senior Primary School of Yixing in Guanlin, 30 kilometers away from home. 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 1922 he went back to his home village and married Qin Chunli.[3] They had 4 children. His eldest daughter, Zijun, was born in Suzhou in 1926, where he was teaching at the time. His second daughter, XinLan, was born in 1932 in Wuxi, followed by his son Xishan, in 1934, and his third daughter Xinmei, in 1936. On September 7, 1937, Wuxi fell to the Japanese. Qian Songyan and his family took refuge in his hometown of Yixing.[3] He lived in Wuxi from 1938 to 1962 and worked as professor of painting and the language arts. In 1939 he moved into his newly renovated home and named his study “QiLu” and “Nan Guo Cao Tang”. In November 1962 he moved to his residence in Nanjing, to No. 117, Zhongyang Road. His personal and artistic life were greatly affected during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76), forcing him to abandon painting until 1972. In 1967 he was accused of being “a major landowner, bureaucrat, and capitalist” by the revolutionary committees. He suffered greatly from the confiscation of his property, personal accusations. and slander that led to a mandatory “re-education through labor”. In 1968, at the age of 69, he was sent to Zhaos Village in Jintan to do physical labor. This included breaking ice with bare hands and washing vegetables during the harsh winter. Both his hands developed arthritis. After an incident that rendered him unconscious, he was allowed to return to Nanjing to recover.