Suzhou's Connection to a Much Sought-after Painter

Zhang Daqian (1899 - 1983), already one of the world's most sought-after artists with annual sales at auction rivaling and even exceeding those of Picasso and Warhol, achieved a new personal record for a single work when his hanging scroll painting, "Peach Blossom Spring," sold on Tuesday (4/5/2016) in Hong Kong for $34.7 million, including the buyer's premium. The buyers, Liu Yiqian and his wife, Wang Wei, are the owner-founders of the Long Museum in Shanghai.

Accomplished painter in the traditional Chinese style, master forger of landscapes in the styles of famed ancient artists, preserver of Buddhist cave-wall paintings, master of modern Impressionist and Expressionist styles, student of textile dyeing techniques, globe-trotting polygamist, keeper of a pet gibbon -- Zhang Daqian's life and career might have marked him, in the modern vernacular, as "the most interesting person in the world."   

Although he was born in Sichuan Province, Zhang had an interesting Suzhou connection that I documented in Beautiful Su. For a period of time in the 1930s, Daqian and his older brother Zhang Shanzi (1882 - 1940) maintained their art studios at the Master of Fishing Nets Garden (Wanshi Yuan). Brother Shanzi, known to posterity as a painter of tigers, is said to have raised and kept tigers on the Wanshi Yuan grounds to facilitate study of his subjects.