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Hello everyone,
I would like to request the always precious help from the forum experts with the identification of this inscription.
It is on a painting that looks quite old. Representing Zhong Kui.I'll post more pictures of the painting.
All the best,
MB

Too bad the seals marks are blurred.
Any comments on age and quality of the painting?
All the help will be greatly appreciated.

Best wishes for everyone

More pictures:

The painting is pretty good quality, but to me the color and modeling make it unlikely to be by Pan Zhengyong, the painter whose name is signed to it. He died in 1921, which would make the cyclical date of this picture 1873, when he would have been 19 or so.

he would be 21. thats not impossible for a professional.
thinking this as a forgery would place you in the position to explain why someone should do a rather difficult quality painting with exactly this inscription.... and of a painter who is not especially appreciated in the market. seems rather unlikely too.

Yes I think your points are all fair. The signature and handwriting seem to compare pretty well to this Sotheby's example, for instance (https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/fine-classical-chinese-paintings-n09117/lot.696.html), but looking through this group of pictures attributed to him I don't see anything terribly similar, so not sure whether this painting may be ok as an early work or what: http://www.gg-art.com/auctiondoc/index/index/keywords/%E6%BD%98%E6%8C%AF%E9%95%9B

I think the differences in this case could already be easily explained with the very different topic, while the hypothesis of a forgery is only working with twisting and bending.
I certainly can understand the great caution of experts in a very hot market with a more professional attitude to producing and selling forgeries than to painting itself at least up to the twentieth century. But than circumstances require to ignore facts and reasonable arguments to think a painting as a forgery, or even it is simply not possible to come up with a good idea when and why somebody should have made the forgery, there should be more caution to condemn reasonable quality.
peter

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