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History of Oil
Painting in China
According to the history,
Chinese ever used oil to paint as early as two thousand years ago, yet
this does not suffice to be called as oil painting. The real oil
painting in the Chinese history began in 1581, when a western missionary
carried portraits of the Lord and the Virgin Mary to China.
At the end of the 15th century, explorers from Europe traveled across
the ocean in the hope of making a fortune in the mysterious East, while
missionaries with the same sporting blood brought Catholicism to China.
It was in Chinese Ming Dynasty that oil paintings were introduced to
China when the cultural and economic exchanges between the East and the
West began, accompanied with the import of western religion.
European missionaries presented Chinese high officials and emperors with
papistical oil paintings out of religious purposes. Interestingly, the
Chinese paid more attention to the oil paintings per se than the
Catholicism in them. For them, the oil painting from the West was
something unfamiliar and novel, different from the traditional Chinese
landscape painting and the flower-bird painting. Chinese imperial
painters reproduced the oil paintings with the help of the missionaries.
The Chinese emperor was so impressed that he decided to sponsor the
development of the western art of painting in China. As part of the
plan, some painters and missionaries stayed in the imperial palace to
serve as imperial painters, teaching the western painting skills and in
the meantime, learning Chinese painting techniques.
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