A Treasury of World Masterpieces in Painting (twenty-volume series)
Author:Zhang Shaoxia
Press:Shanghai Peple’s Fine Arts Publishing House
Place of publication:Shanghai
Publication time: In 1998
In 1997, Shanghai Peple’s Fine Arts Publishing House released A Treasury of World Masterpieces in Painting, which I edited and co-authored with Professor Li Chao. The complete series comprises twenty volumes, featuring three thousand illustrations and several hundred thousand words. It was a key publication during China's Ninth Five-Year Plan and received the singular Gold Award for artistic and literary works in the national publishing system that year. The book garnered significant attention post-publication, with numerous media outlets, including People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, Wenhui Daily, Liberation Daily, and Art Newspaper of China, among others, publishing articles praising it as a “mobile museum.” To date, it remains the largest and most financially invested comprehensive series in China that introduces significant works of painting from the Renaissance to modern times. It is held in nearly a hundred provincial and university libraries, including the National Library of China, Peking University Library, and Tsinghua University Library.