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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.
Poor condition on account of the support: the brittle wartime canvas, on an old strainer, has split horizontally through the fabric in at least six places in the lower half and right-hand side, the paint film cracked along each split and a fine network of the same horizontal cracking across the whole picture; the tacking margins torn and partly detached, the canvas slack. The image itself is complete — the heavy impasto of the flowers intact, no losses, no retouching in normal or ultraviolet light — and the picture needs consolidation, lining and re-stretching by a conservator before it can be hung. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
This lot is sold “as is” and “as attributed”. The attribution reflects the opinion of the auction house and is considered final. The sale of this lot is final.
Offered and sold as attributed; the Five-Year Authenticity Guarantee does not apply to this lot. See our Conditions of Sale.
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The estimate of €3,000–€4,000 is our opinion of the range this work should reach; the starting price of €1,000 is the lowest bid we accept. We have not published comparable results for this lot; ask us before the sale and we will send the results we based the estimate on.
Bidding on this site, the buyer’s premium is 25%, Spanish IVA included, and there is no VAT on the hammer price and no card fee: at the starting price of €1,000 the total is €1,250; at the low estimate of €3,000 the total is €3,750; at the high estimate of €4,000 the total is €5,000.
Through LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, Drouot or Bidspirit the premium is 30%, so the same hammer of €4,000 costs €5,200 there. Shipping and insurance are quoted separately; the estimator on this page gives the figure for your country. Buyers outside the EU pay no Spanish tax on the lot; the destination’s import rules apply (United States: original paintings and drawings enter duty-free; United Kingdom: 5% import VAT on art). Card payments are accepted up to €10,000; larger amounts by bank transfer.
No. This lot is catalogued as “Attr. to”, a qualified attribution: it is offered and sold as described, and the Five-Year Authenticity Guarantee of Section 4 of the Conditions of Sale does not apply. The estimate reflects that.
A condition report with ultraviolet photographs is prepared on request, normally within two working days; the condition summary on this page is examined in-house and is not a conservator’s report. Further photographs of any detail, the reverse or the frame are sent on request. The work can be examined in our Barcelona showroom by appointment before the sale, and you are welcome to send your own conservator or specialist.
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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