There is a third collaborator in this compelling story: the author, Claire Roberts, who has brought all this important research together and distilled it in such a scholarly and readable way. ‘My aim was not to produce a volume of translations,’ she writes, ‘but rather to use a selection of Fou Lei’s writings that related both directly and indirectly to his friendship with the artist Huang Binhong, and allow readers to consider the crisis in twentieth-century Chinese art through the lives of two important and significant figures with strong links to scholarly traditions.’

Beginning by asking, ‘What brought these two men together?’, Roberts goes on to paint a word picture of, on the one hand, the elderly scholar–painter who had lived through the turmoil of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth; and, on the other, the confident and cosmopolitan Fou Lei, a much younger man who lived and studied in Paris. ‘He was passionate about art criticism and noted as a translator of French literature. Fou Lei was a member of a generation of idealistic young people who were well versed in Eastern and Western ways, men and women who conceived of China’s future as being inextricably connected to an international world.’

The story of these two men’s friendship is told through letters, photographs, and works of art, as well as through words. But it is also the story of Chinese artists and writers exploring what was happening overseas and bringing those discoveries back home. Not long after Japan attacked Shanghai in 1932, Fou Lei was involved with an arts group called Muse, and also with a more radical group, the Storm Society, which, Roberts tells us, was ‘inspired by the model of a Parisian salon. The group was established by Pang Xunqin, Wang Jiyuan and Ni Yide in late 1931. The Storm Society held monthly meetings and brought together artists who had returned to China following periods of study in Paris and Tokyo ... [T]he group promoted modern art and personal creativity in the face of the difficult political environment.’

By contrast, the painter Huang Binhong grew up in the Lower Yangtzee River Valley, the artistic heartland of old China. Born in 1865, ‘he grew up in an environment of paintings and books, delighting in watching his father paint … Like his predecessors, Huang Binhong followed the traditional practice of learning by copying paintings, absorbing their spirit and technique in the process.’ From the sound of it, he was surrounded by some of the most sublime landscape in China, and the tools for capturing it were manufactured in his home town of Shexian. Known as the ‘Four Treasures of a Scholar’s Studio’, they were ink, paper, brushes, and ink stones.

Having trained to become a civil servant – or a ‘scholar–official’ – Huang had to make a new life for himself and his wife when the Manchu-Qing dynasty ended in the first decade of the twentieth century and educational reform abolished the need for such scholar–officials. ‘In 1909, the year after Fou Lei was born, Huang Binhong moved to Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city and a new centre of business, media, and culture. He was 46, and the move marked a major turning point in his life. During his 30-year residence in Shanghai Huang developed a high profile as an artist, connoisseur, art historian and art editor.’

The two men first met in 1931 at a banquet held for Fou Lei, who had just returned to Shanghai with his wife, by steamer, after four years in Europe. They made one last trip to the Louvre before leaving France, but the book also tells delightful tales of the couple’s time in Rome and their experience of seeing the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini. ‘Fou Lei thrilled to see the legacy of ancient Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque artists and architects. They met writers, academics, and Sinologists, and Fou Lei was invited to speak to the Italian Royal Geographic Society on “The Significance of the People’s Army’s Northern Expedition and the Battle between Northern Warlords”.’

At times the book takes on the feel of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,as Roberts weaves in incidental detail from everyday life of people motivated and excited by art, and of art being at the heart of society, in Florence or Beijing. But in the end, this story is one of synthesis, marked by Fou Lei’s statement towards the end of his life that, ‘My love-affair with Chinese painting began when I was twenty-one studying Western art at the Louvre in Paris.’

Subsequent chapters cover the early correspondence between these two men; Huang Binhong’s First Solo Show Curated by Fou Lei; Artistic Conversations; and Huang Binhong: The Artistic Legacy. I highly recommend Friendship in Art to the general reader as well as the specialist scholar.

Roberts ends with a tantalising if brief overview of Chinese art today and of the place of historical brush painting in it. She mentions how Tian’anmen Square (1993), an oil painting by Beijing-based artist Zhang Xiaogang, sold for US$2.3 million at Christie’s in Hong Kong in 2005 (earlier, we heard of the frugality of Huang Binhong’s final years), and contrasts the extended travels of Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957), Xi Bing (b. 1955), Wenda Gu (b. 1955), Chen Zhen (1955–2000), Guan Wei (b. 1957), and Ah Xian (b. 1960). Huang Binhong never left China, but, like Fou Lei, many of these contemporary artists, born just before the Cultural Revolution and Huang Binhong’s own suicide, spent time abroad in, variously, New York, Sydney, London, Tokyo, and Paris.

Roberts writes that, ‘Whilst away, almost all of them have been forced to confront their own “Chineseness”, and have responded to complex feelings of “otherness” in their artistic practice. For some artists, it has meant working with materials that have a strong Chinese resonance, such as gunpowder, porcelain, Chinese medicine, furniture, calligraphy or tea, whereas others have drawn more indirectly on attitudes, approaches, and philosophies drawn from their backgrounds in shaping their work as contemporary artists.’

If Claire Roberts is looking for her next writing project, she would make a brilliant ‘Vasari’ to this new generation of ‘Ocean-Turtles’ (haigui), as these returning artists have been labelled by those who stayed at home.