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Hi
I ve been asked to check exactly what this is,how old it is and is it worth preserving in a better way than it currently is by an elderly neighbor. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I suggest that you bring this to a mounter and have it backed with another piece of silk and then paper. It seems to be 100 years or so old, painted by someone based in Shanghai. If you are near a city with a museum with a good sized department of Chinese or Japanese art, ask them who they use or whether their conservationists will do it on a freelance basis. Just a simple backing to protect the remaining material should be fine; mounting it as a scroll will be quite expensive.

Though the damage has obliterated the surname, I think it must be Wang. The given name confuses me though. The first character is Cheng 承 but the second character I can't look up successfully. It seems to be serving as a variant for something else; it's written clearly enough, it's a 動 put on top of the fire radical 灬 but this isn't itself in the dictionary. Super or Mikeoz or someone else here may know what it is a variant of.

There are three variants of this character: 勳, 勲 and their simplified counterpart 勋, all pronounced xun (first tone) and meaning meritorious deed, merits or rank.

The last three characters wind up as 承, 勲 & 繒 (Cheng, Xun & Zeng), with Zeng meaning "Silk Fabrics" but also being a surname.

I did Google character searches with all the combinations and came up with lots of people with given name of Chengxun and the surnames Wang and Jiang (王 & 江), which both seemed to fit the damaged space. No hits on these names in the context of silk fabrics, though.

FYI for Rat and others who have a knowledge of Chinese characters and their radicals, the link below to Jim Breen's WWWJDIC online Japanese dictionary, which supports the Unicode Organization, has a multi-radical search function which can ease the task of looking up some of these difficult characters. Once the character is found, there's a kanji lookup function that will take you to the Unicode page for the Chinese character, where Mandarin and Cantonese transcriptions, as well as those for Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese are listed.

Best regards,

Bill H

URL Title :WWWJDIC

brilliant! I think I am losing my mind sometimes....

...and bingo! here is another similar work by Wang Chengxun (王承勲)
http://www.dyee.org/bbs/thread-322692-1-1.html

and here are two similar pictures of his that sold for RMB 1680 (~$280) in 2010
http://pmzp.findart.com.cn/2712472.html

The picture posted here is damaged, and the photos online aren't good enough to determine their condition, much less how they compare to this one, but useful reference information anyway.

Thanks Bill

That's excellent thank you. At least now I can give the lady a story behind the piece and hopefully to Persuade her to preserve it and pass it down to the next generation.
Most appreciated

My apologies but my finger earlier stopped a stroke short of the silk art's correct final character in my trusty Mathews Dictionary. The last three characters in that line on the silk art are 承, 勲 and 繪 (Cheng, Xun & Hui not Cheng, Xun & Zeng). Hui means to paint or sketch.

Best regards,

Bill H.

Most appreciated, that's a lot more information than I had. My neighbour who is in her 80's told me that it was a wedding present to her parents in the 1920's so that fits ferfectly with your estimated age of the piece. Is their any particular value to the piece other than the obvious sentimental value? Thank you again for all your help.

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