Around the Double Ninth Festival in the Bingzi year (1936), I was on the Li River and saw a strong skipper. It was a rare encounter. He was really Heracles! I first made a first sketch, but I had to concentrate my energy on completing it, Beihong.
The inscription mentions Heracles, a figure from ancient Greek myth. Before the Double Ninth Festival, Xu Beihong travelled across the Li River. On the riverbank, he saw a strong boatman. He was struck by the figure and used the man as a model in the work. This work is also an excellent example of modelling nude figures.
These boatmen push themselves forward naked with their booms, just as boats sail in Venice or Giethoorn.
Xu Beihong (19 July 1895 - 26 September 1953) was a Chinese painter from Yixing, Jiangsu province. He is particularly known for his ink paintings of horses and birds. In 1915, he moved to Shanghai. Here he lived off selling his works. In 1917, he travelled to Tokyo in Japan to study painting here. Back in China, he was given a chair at Peking University. From 1919, Xu studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris.
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