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Signed in Chinese characters and dated ’44’ (lower right).
Sizes:
Artwork: 45 × 55 cm | 17.7 × 21.7 in
Red carnations, white and pink roses and sprays of blossom burst from a blue-and-white Chinese vase set on a folded cloth, against a mauve wall streaked with blue. The brushwork is thick, rapid and directional — the flowers almost modelled in paint — and the picture is signed in Chinese characters and dated ’44’.
The work is offered as attributed to Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), the most celebrated woman painter of modern China. Trained in Shanghai, Lyon, Paris and Rome, she fused the Post-Impressionist colour of the École de Paris with the line and spirit of Chinese painting, and after her return to Paris in 1937 she painted flowers constantly — often, as here, in a Chinese vase against a flat, patterned ground, the composition anchored by a sweep of drapery.
The canvas is unlined on an old stretcher.
Private collection France. Acquired from the above by the current owner.
Oil on canvas, unframed. The paint layer is stable with the heavy impasto intact; the tacking margins are frayed and worn with small tears at the edges, the canvas is slack in places and the stretcher is old. Re-stretching is advisable. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
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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.
Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), from Yangzhou to Montparnasse: her training, her flower still lifes and nudes between Chinese line and Parisian colour, and the 1944 canvas attributed to her at Aurora & Athena.
Highlights of the Aurora & Athena autumn sale on 17 October 2026: Bridget Tichenor, Nicholas Roerich, Konstantin Korovin, Gerard Sekoto, Jan Zrzavý, Pan Yuliang, a Miró lithograph and the painters of the École de Paris.
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