A ceremony was held by the Ho Chi Minh Museum on August 23 to receive three paintings of President Ho Chi Minh by painter Van Giao (1916-1996).
At the hand-over ceremony (Photo: NDO)
The paintings include a sketch and an oil painting featuring President Ho writing the Declaration of Independence, and a painting entitled ‘Being Escorted in the Early Morning’.
They were donated by Doan Van Duc, Deputy Chief of the Office of the Hanoi Municipal Party Committee, and the family of Nguyen Van Duc, the son of painter Van Giao.
Born into a family with rich revolutionary tradition, Doan Van Duc revealed that both his grandfather and father had the opportunity to meet Uncle Ho in person.
He decided to donate the painting to the Ho Chi Minh Museum so that it can receive better preservation and promotion.
Painter Nguyen Van Duc said that his father spent more than 30 years of his life painting on the topic of Uncle Ho, stressing that the beloved leader is Giao’s endless source of inspiration.
The donation of these paintings to the Ho Chi Minh Museum is in line with painter Van Giao's aspiration as he believes that the museum can preserve and promote works about Uncle Ho to people nationwide, overseas Vietnamese, as well as international visitors so that they can have a deeper understanding about the revolutionary life and career, ideology and morality of the great Vietnamese leader, he emphasized.
Van Giao was one of the Vietnamese revolutionary painters of the first generation. He was the first painter to directly depict Uncle Ho’s portrait in the revolutionary atmosphere in Hanoi in October 1945. With his passion for painting, Van Giao directly came to places where Uncle Ho used to live and work, including Nghe An and Cao Bang provinces, to create artworks.
Speaking at the ceremony, Director of the Ho Chi Minh Museum Vu Manh Ha expressed his deep thanks to the donors for these precious artworks, underlining that the three paintings contribute to enriching the museum's collection of paintings about President Ho Chi Minh.
He also promised that the paintings would be preserved in the best conditions to further uphold their values at exhibitions on President Ho Chi Minh./.
BTA