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Could someone offer a translation of the artist signature?

I bought this scroll painting from a rather unlikely town in West Florida where the antique shops are HEAVILY picked, but as the saying goes....even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Painted area measures about 4 feet x 14" wide.

The painting is on silk, so while I would describe the colors as somewhat muted anyway, the flash on my camera has made the painting appear much lighter than in actuality. However, without the flash, I would not be able to capture the detail as clearly, so I've opted to post the photos as they are.

The artist seems to have a good hand and put plenty of detail into the fine tree branches, wood plank fence surrounding the house, and painted the mountains in varying degrees of depth, so I think the artist is a professional.

My concern is that these mountain landscape paintings seem to be the most popular scenes to reproduce for the tourist trade, so I would not be entirely surprised to find that the painting is a copy of a more famous painting/painter.

My concern over the quality of the piece is that is has only one seal, that of the artist (I assume, since I don't know the seal or the artist). Most fine examples I've seen have at least 2 or more seals, especially a painting of this size.

That said, there does seem to be age, both in the general wear of the silk/paper scroll, but more importantly the reverse paper has what I describe as a negative image of the painting that has been created from light passing through the unpainted areas over numerous years.

I first saw this effect when I started to collect 19th c. Japanese woodblock prints in the 1990's, but I'm not sure if there is any science that can definitively determine how old a painting is by this effect. Generally, I found that pieces with this 'negative' effect were around 100 yrs old or more, but I'm sure a lot of other factors play into what causes this to happen.

The other interesting feature of the painting is that the scroll handles (zhoutou - thank you Wikipedia!) appear to be huanghuali. I'm aware that some ordinary rosewood will lighten and appear to be similar in color to huanghuali, but this wood does not look like it has gone through that type of light bleaching. Also, the cheaper scrolls tend to have cheaply lacquered or painted handles.

I've posted as much detail as I could fit into the 3 images. Happy to post more if it helps.

Thanks!
Tim

something like "Parting at the Hall before Cloudy Mountains", dated 1975 or 1915 by X Zongshan, the surname too grassy for me to recognize (sorry!), the given name repeated on the seal.

I could see someone in Taiwan, say, i.e. influenced by Pu Ru for example, doing this in 1975, but a 1915 date seems like a real stretch.

Yes, I see the influence of Pu Ru, too, but it seems that the examples of Pu Ru's works that I've found are done with a broader/flowing brush stroke.

This artist painted using a lot more line work - I'll need to post new photos, but the water has fine lines that show the current and a few figures have faces.

I find a painting by an artist by the name of An He (An Ho, b. 1927), but only the one example of a painting sold through Sotheby's....mountains were rendered in quite a similar manner. In fact, the tall mountain in the top left of my painting seem to match the one in the Sotheby's example in quite nicely. Also, similar line work in the water and other details.

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/chinese-paintings-hk0516/lot.1304.html

No date was provided for the example of painting sold at Sotheby's, but perhaps both artists are from the same school...just a stab in the dark. I couldn't find any biographical info on An He or An Ho.

An Ho (安和) is a woman who studied under Pu Ru as a youngster. She had a solo exhibition in Taibei during the 1970s and a career retrospective exhibition there in 1994 too.

Your picture's date is surely 1975, perhaps copying an original by Pu Ru, Zhang Daqian, or Xie Zhiliu, or perhaps the artist is simply painting in that mid-20th century style.

Hopefully someone who reads better than I do will identify and post the surname so we can look for other examples by your artist.

Here's the outer label on the scroll. Does this help any with the artist's surname?

Not directly, it just reads "Landscape" at the top, and "Zong Shan" at the bottom. However, it occurs to me that, although likely still a pseudonym, Zong can stand by itself as a Chinese surname, so it's conceivable (sort of) that the artist is calling himself "Mountain Zong", and the character I can't read is not a surname after all. But I don't think that's really the case. I think we may be stuck momentarily until someone with better cursive reading skills comes along (whereupon we'll wonder why we didn't recognize the now illegible character as whatever it is revealed to so obviously be...)

actually, I had this thought before but wasn't confident enough in my reading so let it go, but now I think the label suggests that it makes more sense: I think that the third character I am seeing as an illegible surname is actually the character 夏, meaning "summer", resulting in:

乙卯夏宗山


(this being a good example of how more complete information rather than just a closeup of a seal helps those of us trying to figure your stuff out, people.)

Just to be difficult, it is also the case that 夏
can also be a Chinese surname. But a quick Google search shows no painter with the name 夏宗山.

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