During their recent visit to the Du Fu Thatched Cottage in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, visitors were impressed with gigantic posters promoting the painting exhibition of a 106-year-old in front of its entrance.

Artist Yan Jiyuan works on one of his paintings in this file photo.

After appreciating some 100 traditional Chinese paintings of landscape, flowers, birds and fish on display in the cottage, which is a museum in memory of Du Fu (AD 712-770), one of China's greatest poets, they would marvel at the painter Yan Jiyuan's talent and wonder why they had never heard of his name.

Yan Jiyuan, a contemporary of master Chinese painter Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), is the oldest painter in China. He became famous in the 1930s. But due to his unique experience and shunning of publicity, he may be unknown to the young, said art critics.

Yan was born into a wealthy landlord's family in Neijiang, Sichuan, in 1901. He was two years younger than Zhang Daqian who was his distant relative and also a native of Neijiang. "When my father went to town, he would take me to Daqian's home because we could get along," Yan recalled calmly.

He still remembers the episode that Zhang's mother took out her own painting, asking Zhang and him to copy it.

Yan was seven when he started learning painting from his father. In 1928, Yan passed the examination to the Shanghai Sino-French Industrial College and lived in the home of Zhang Daqian and his elder brother Zhang Shanzi, also a master painter.

With the help of the Zhang brothers, Yan, who cherished the idea of helping build a strong China with science, left Shanghai for Japan in 1934. He majored in mechanical engineering at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University.

After the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression began in 1937, Yan decided to return to China. Soon after receiving his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Tokyo the next year, he headed home. "After I arrived in the Tianjin Port in the winter of 1938, Daqian was there to greet me and invited me to live in his residence in Peking," Yan said.

He asked Zhang who was teaching in Peking which was occupied by invading Japanese troops to go to Chongqing, China's war-time capital. "To raise funds to travel to Chongqing, we held the first joint painting exhibition in the Zhongshan Park in Peking," Yan said.

After settling down in Chongqing, Zhang and Yan held many joint painting exhibitions. "We drew some 80 landscape paintings together and included them in an exhibition to raise funds for the Chinese fighting against Japanese invaders," Yan recalled.

Before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Zhang left the mainland for Taiwan, and Yan never saw him again.

In the 1950s, Yan worked as a technician in the Chongqing Municipal Industrial Bureau. In 1957 when the country launched the radical anti-rightist movement, Yan was labeled a rightist.

"The bureau had the quota of selecting eight rightists. At first, it selected seven people qualified for the title but couldn't find the last one. As it had to fulfill the task assigned by higher authorities, it labeled me a rightist, for I was born in a landlord's family and studied abroad," Yan said.

After he became a rightist, Yan was forced to work in a toothbrush factory in the city and his family lived in a temple. In 1964, Yan sought treatment for arthritis in Beijing and was knocked down by a bicycle on the Chang'an Avenue after buying his return railway ticket.

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