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Subject:Re: seals on kakejiku
Posted By: David Lane Thu, May 19, 2016
Mikeoz has a lot to contribute in this area, so perhaps he will also weigh in if he sees your post.
You have mentioned a number of areas that make this field both engrossing and vexing (depending on which side of the day one wakes up on). The fact that just about every East Asian painter and calligrapher has learned how to control a brush and apply various techniques by copying model works means that huge numbers of copies exist, and if you want to go into semantics, homages, imitations, fakes, and forgeries as well. Moreover, for about 1,000 years there have been stories of mounters (shops that mount or remount painted or written works of art onto scrolls) replacing originals with fakes, and of dealers cutting pictures and colophons up to resell them separately, of adding false seals and signatures to anonymous works in hopes of passing them off as a valuable old master, etc etc etc.
It is normally not possible to know the full number of a given artist's seals without a direct relationship with the artist. Further, the widespread availability of handbooks that collect depictions of some or most of them at actual size ensures that every faker on the planet can duplicate them with greater or lesser accuracy. So don't rely on seals to validate a picture for you, just as you don't rely on a reign mark to validate Chinese imperial porcelain. Instead, take the seals as one more element to consider in coming to a judgment about a particular work.
I know little about Japanese practice but share the following because I think most of it overlaps with Chinese practice. The legend carved on a seal can include a variety of things. Some seals of course include the artist's name, or perhaps surname or given name only. Seals also include alternative names, which someone might receive upon becoming recognized as an adult, for example, or simply a name they give themselves. Artists typically have a handful of alternate names, and will have seals inscribed with them in various styles. Seal carving is an art form unto itself, involving the selection of a desirable material (usually stone, but occasionally also jade, cast bronze, crystal, porcelain, bamboo, etc) and choices about the script type (there are a handful of scripts commonly used for Chinese seals), and the actual composition of the characters in question (seal carvers like to show their knowledge and create artistic effect, sometimes by selecting archaic or obscure variant forms of a given character). An artist may therefore have form 1 to dozen or more different seals all carved with the same nickname, but done in varied shapes and sizes. S/he will use the one s/he likes at any given moment.
In addition to seals that contain one of the artist's actual or adopted names, there is another class of seal, usually called a "leisure seal" in English, which does not identify the artist per se, but may include a pithy aphorism or some phrase the artist feels is indicative of character. Others may include the name of the artist's studio (which by extension serve as a proxy for the name of the artist).
Ordinarily, an artist will impress one or two seals relating to his/her name immediately following his/her written inscription. Leisure seals will appear in corners or other areas of the image.
Later collectors will also apply seals to a given work of art, and they will sometimes invite friends to view their collection and allow them to apply their own seals to the work or write an inscription of appreciation. Collectors' seals will usually but not always also appear in the corners or unobtrusively somewhere, sometimes on the mounting rather than on picture surface.
Japanese practice seems a bit more complex than Chinese practice in that in my experience, one or more of the seals that Chinese artists apply after their inscriptions are often real-name-based, whereas those that Japanese artists apply more frequently include nicknames exclusively, so you have to be able to read the seal (ascertaining the character based on your ability to read the script type in question) and then go figure out who it belongs to to ascertain the painter's supposed identity. Further, I have noticed a lot more variety in the composition of characters in Japanese seals than I have seen in Chinese seals, so they may be harder to decipher.
All that said I don't know anything about your painter. That variety exists in the artist's oeuvre and handwriting over time is not usual: they start out relatively immature and develop a personal style over time that they may deliberately alter. They also tend to use certain seals during certain periods of their life.
To help assess your pictures, your first goal should be to get an understanding of the artist's style from the most unquestioned sources that you can, typically works in leading museum collections (but museums contain copies and fakes too...) around which there is a good deal of consensus. Compare your works to those that seem unimpeachable.
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