Pan Yuliang

Pan Yuliang was born Chen Xiuqing in Yangzhou in 1895. Orphaned as a child and sold into a brothel, she was bought out and married by the customs official Pan Zanhua, who encouraged her to study. In 1920 she entered the Shanghai Art Academy, one of its first women students, and in 1921 won a scholarship to France, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and then in Paris under Lucien Simon, and in Rome at the Accademia di Belle Arti.

Back in China in 1928 she taught at the Shanghai Academy and at the Central University in Nanjing, exhibited widely and became the best-known woman artist of the Republic — but her nudes and her past drew hostility, and in 1937 she returned to Paris for good.

In Paris Pan Yuliang painted for forty years in a small studio in Montparnasse: nudes, self-portraits, still lifes of flowers in Chinese vases, dancers and cats, in a style that married Post-Impressionist colour with the ink line of Chinese painting, and later in ink and colour on paper. She exhibited at the Salons, was honoured by the city of Paris and refused to sell her work abroad, so that after her death in 1977 more than four thousand works went to the Anhui Provincial Museum and the National Art Museum of China.

Her rediscovery began in the 1990s; today she is a subject of films and novels, and her paintings hold records for a Chinese woman artist at auction.