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I am trying to authenticate a hand scroll that I purchased around 1970. I know very little about scrolls so any information you can provide including research sources will be greatly appreciated. If anyone can translate the seals, signature or caligraphy I'd appreciate that as well.

Your handscroll is imitating "100 Horses" by Giuseppe Castiglione, in the National Palace Museum, Taiwan:
http://www.npm.gov.tw/en/Article.aspx?sNo=04000989

Hi Rat & Joe, when I checked to see if there was any validity to the colophons on this scroll, I couldn't get any Google hits that looked to be applicable to the following apparent title and date:

春郊婧馬圖 - Chun Jiao jing ma tu - Picture of supple horses in the countryside during springtime

乾隆四十五年青潭清 - Qianlong sishiwu nian qing tan...? ...at a Qinghai pool in Qianlong year 45 (1780 - couldn't figure out the rest)

I wonder if you see any reason to think the colophons are anything but part of the decoration, or could some earlier owner perhaps have taken the painting to be old and valuable?

Thanks,

Bill

rat,
Any idea about its age or the artist? Can you please tell me more about the three different caligraphies? I've read that the owner of the scroll would honor a guest by asking them to write a passage on a scroll but I haven't been able to corroborate that. Please tell me more or direct me to a few good references.

Thanks for you comments!

You are correct about the owner of a scroll asking guests (or experts) to write a passage of calligraphy commenting on the scroll, either on a hanging scroll directly or on its mounting, or on a separate piece of paper later mounted with the scroll in question. Tell me what you want to know about specifically and I'll direct you to references.

Otherwise I can't tell much, but the calligraphies (colophons) as well as the frontispiece are all fake (the calligraphy is of poor quality, and the ink is a solid black, suggesting that it was written with store-bought liquid ink rather than ground on an inkstone as was traditionally the case. one of the colophons is purportedly by Qing painter Dai Xi, I'm not sure of the other two, but all three are "dated" to the Jiaqing reign. the frontispiece as Bill H has pointed out is "dated" to the Qianlong reign.

When I magnify the leftmost picture of the painting itself it appears to be signed as being by "Zi'ang", which is a name Yuan painter of horses Zhao Mengfu used for himself. But that signature and certainly the seals are spurious too.

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