Former art students said that a famous oil painting that sold for 72.8 million yuan (then $11.4 million) at a Beijing auction in June last year was a fake, news website china.com.cn reported.

The seller had said the painting was Body Miss Jiang Biwei by Xu Beihong (1895-1953), a famous Chinese painter. Xu painted the original for his wife, Jiang, when they were in France.

But ten people who were in the China Central Academy of Fine Arts' first graduate training class said in an open letter on Thursday that the painting was actually one of their assignments from 1983, not Xu's work.

The former art students said the model in the painting was a woman from East China's Jiangsu province, not Jiang. They also published pictures of paintings their classmates did using the same model.

By Chen Yingqun