Thein Han

Thein Han (, ; 1910–1986) was a major Yangon painter of the post-World War II era who produced a number of memorable works and who had an abiding influence on the evolution of the more conservative painting styles in Burma in the decades that followed. He should not be confused with Thein Han the writer and art critic, who is often quoted for his article written on Burmese painting published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1958.

Overview Thein Han was one of the six original apprentices who lived with and studied under Ba Nyan after Ba Nyan returned from his art studies in London in 1930. Three of these apprentices became major painters in Burma and Thein Han was one of them. Other painters such as Ngwe Gaing and Kyaw Hlaing had spent long periods studying with Ba Nyan but not as a live-in apprentices at his home. In Burma, there is a certain sentimental attachment to those painters who studied under Ba Nyan as full-fledged apprentices, perhaps because this training was reminiscent of the training painters of the Traditional School had received as far as memory could recall.

Ba Nyan's two other apprentices who studied under him formally at his home — Ba Kyi and Aung Khin — broke away from Ba Nyan's realist and naturalist style of painting. Ba Kyi initiated a Neo-Traditional revival in the post-World War II period and Aung Khin became an impressionist, abstract expressionist, and finally a non-figurative abstract painter.

Thein Han, however, spent an unusual nine years studying with Ba Nyan