10 Yuan 100th Anniv of Birth, Xu Beihong, painter

Xu Beihong died in 1953, leaving behind an institution as much as a body of work — he had rebuilt the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from near nothing after 1949 and spent his final years acquiring European masterworks for the Chinese state. This coin was issued in 1995, the centenary of his birth in Yixing, Jiangsu.

The People's Bank issued several painter-series commemoratives through the mid-1990s, but Xu's remains among the more culturally loaded, given his complicated position as a Western-trained realist who became the primary architect of state art education under the early PRC.