The oil painting Put Down Your Whip, by the famous painter Xu Beihong, had a turnover of HK$ 72 million in Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong on April 7, not only significantly refreshing Xu Beihong’s painting auction record, but also hitting a new world auction record for Chinese paintings once again.

At 7 p.m., located at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, the auction venue was full of audience. Put Down Your Whip was at a price of HK$ 2,000 million for starting, and then the price rose alternately. A telephone bidding competitors won after bidding with other bidders for about 10 minutes at the final hammer price of HK$ 64 million. Plus commissions and other expenses of HK$ 8,000,000, this anonymous collectors will pay the price of HK $ 72 million to get the painting.

Put Down Your Whip is adapted from the famous playwright Tian Han, according to the German writer Goethe one-act play adapted by his novel, and is adapted into a war street play later. In October 1939 , Xu Beihong saw the China National Salvation Theater was giving the performances on a plaza in Singapore, deeply moved , and took about 10 days time to create a piece of anti-Japanese theme paintings.

This oil painting Put Down Your Whip is 1.44 meters high , 0.9 meters wide , and Xu Beihong painted the play’s protagonist, a famous actor Anna close to the real proportion. In the painting, Anna wearing a blue and white pattern dress, holding red silk, dancing, young and old look intoxicated to watch, and there are some rags, someone in military uniform with guns, making a lifelike painting reproduction of the life of the state and heavy mood of the people during the war.

This painting has repeatedly exhibited in Xu Beihong’s lifetime, but since 1954 it “disappeared”. The auction house got the painting from an Asian collector, making it reappear after hiding half a century before the world .

Last November, Xu Beihong’s painting Slave and Lion was sold for HK$ 53.88 million in Hong Kong, making a world auction record for Chinese paintings at that time.

Two Young Girls at the Piano is an oil painting created by Pierre Auguste Renoir, which is a notable French artist known for his depictions of pretty children, pleasant scenes, flowers, and especially curvy women. Renoir was also the leader of the Impressionism, who first detach from the movement’s ultramodern direction. What’s more, he has a great enthusiasm for painting since he was assigned to learn skills in painting on crockery and screen in his early age.

In this piece, it describes two young girls sitting at a piano and playing and practicing music in a bedroom, where there is a big, pink bed at the back. An orange and blue curtain partitioning the bed and the piano is picked up. The two girls have the same hair style that both tie a bowknot in them. Besides, they also have same style dress in different color. The girl with blond and curly hair is playing while holding the notes, sitting on a red chair with metal back. The brunette-haired girl in orange dress is standing beside and keeping an eye on the notes, which seems that they two are practicing and exchanging their ideas about how to play the song in the notes. The piano is a dark brown and there is a vase with beautiful and bright colored flowers on the top of it. There may have some other notes on a short shelf next to the piano.

This scene was based on the domestic life of bourgeois at that time. And it was made for the Musee du Lexembourg museum in Paris by the French government.