Character Evaluation of Xu Yansun

He is a traditional figure painter with profound attainments. His figure paintings are complicated but not complicated, simple but appropriate, and his brushwork is "like a silk worm spitting out silk, and his writing is like the wind rolling over the waves"; he is especially capable of making the most of the changes of yin and yang, and the changes of the flow and staccato of the real and the coloring is also elegant and bright.

He has held many solo exhibitions in Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin, etc. He is highly accomplished in both brushwork figures and realistic figures. While teaching at the Beijing Jinghua Academy of Fine Arts, he trained a generation of talents in promoting the development of Chinese figure painting.

There are more than a hundred figure paintings created by Xu Yansun in his lifetime. He had a deep understanding of the appearance of the depicted objects, the clothing system, the style of the palace carriage and horses, and mostly painted figures of swords, horses, chivalrous characters, historical stories and legends, religious and Buddhist figures, and female figures, and was good at expressing the structure of the plot and the grand scenes, which made the people of the time praised him as "exquisite in the material but sufficient in the spirit, and profound in the evidence and deep in the hidden".

Xu Yansun's paintings are characterized by exquisite but not dull character portrayal and rich but not cluttered scenery. His masterpieces of heavy-color works include "Pressing on Music" and "Three Guards in Longzhong". The white and light-colored work "Wushuang Spectrum" scroll is a white work with a very realistic style. In this work, he gave full play to his understanding of the line and the performance of the knowledge of the object, put aside the slightly complicated background, only with concise ink and brushwork dedicated to the performance of the character form, the whole piece of work is in order, sparse and dense changes in the creation of the beginning by the same generation of masters at the time, Zhou Zhaoxiang, Wu Jingting, Qigong and other people highly praised.