Jiang Eshi is one of those Chinese artists of the 20th century who are significantly better known and more often represented in collections outside their homeland than in China itself. The Collection of East Asian Art owns 28 individual pictures and an album by the artist. A selection of these is being exhibited to mark his 100th birthday.

Jiang Eshi was born in 1913 in Yangzhou, in the Chinese coastal province of Jiangsu. Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 he left the country, initially for Hong Kong. After a period in New York and numerous trips to Europe, he finally settled in the 1960s in Marbella, Spain and Luzern, Switzerland.

He was a pupil of Huang Binhong, one of the last of the great literati painters. He followed the traditional practice of studying and copying the works of old masters and assimilating the style of his teacher. On this foundation he went on to develop an idiosyncratic painting style, characterised by an experimental approach. Real landscapes interwoven with occasional impressionistic elements, a strong palette and decorative embellishments were merged with classical tradition in a novel fusion of Western and Eastern styles.