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Inscription on a painting, any help is appreciated. I can submit a picture of the
entire painting if needed.

it's supposed to be an inscription that some later admirer/connoisseur wrote on the painting, identifying your painting as done by Huang Quan of the Five Dynasties. It is instead a modern fabrication. the only extant work that's somewhat credibly attributable to Huang or in his supposed style is a short handscroll of birds and other small animals in Beijing that was probably painted as a teaching tool.

John:

Please post more pictures including complete painting. Thanks.

B

rat and Bill,
thank you for your reply.
I am posting three more pics.
One is of a 20 character jueju style poem
in the unique calligraphy of Lu You. At the
time that he wrote the poem he held the office
Imperial Compiler.
I have had this poem translated as:

A flock of birds gather never stop,
Fighting for the paddy and the grain
Shoaly land official hurried for the land tax and other levies
No matter how hard one works, one still has to wait for the Autumn.

I am not sure of what shoaly land official means.
I have looked very carefully at the study work that Huang Quan created for his son Huang Jubao, and the paintings of his other son Huang Jucai. The study work was done on silk, and as a work for study it is hard to figure out what Huang Quan would have done when painting these creatures in a landscape.
The other two pictures show some of the birds
and their landscape.
I have removed the seals from the painting, as
I would rather have the painting stand on its
own style than get confused with which collection
it may have been declared to have been.

I agree with you regarding the seals; the painting should stand on its own merits. As a pre-Song court painter, Huang would most likely not have painted on paper. Given the high quality of the modelling of his birds and other animals in the Beijing study piece (which might be a Song copy of an original in any case), I can't imagine that he painted the birds in this scroll. These birds are much more crude. In addition, the extent to which the artist of this scroll privileges "line/brushstroke" over "realism" is out of keeping with the elements that were considered desirable in a painting of Huang Quan's era. There's just a whole lot about this scroll that screams "modern imposter" to me. the paper for example has been soaked or darkened with wash to give it the appearance of age

the translation you have his highly literal, not too idiomatic. the characters for "shoaly fields official" are literally that: "lake", "fields", "official" and they no doubt have a more idiomatic rendering (that I don't know offhand).

rat,
thanks for your help.
the attribution Huang Quan did not seem right to me either. the paper's staining and cracking do seem to record a history of sorts. the oldest
calligraphy is damaged in virtually all the cracking and wear. the newer seals[supposedly
18th century]have filled in some of the cracks.
the wear is consistent as having come from rolling and unrolling. as an added piece of
information, opaque[non florescent] white has
been applied to the quail feathers. check out
Lu You's seal and calligraphy in CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY 2008 Yale University Press. page 274
fig5.31. I did a digital overlay of the matching
seal and found a perfect match.
Bill i attached a low res pic of the entire
painting.

thanks for the picture. stylistically I can't see how this is an old painting.

thanks at least for looking rat.
i cannot find a match to it either.
it does have a unique feel of liveliness.
i appreciate your responses positive
or negative.

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