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This is my first time posting, so any help would be greatly appreciated. I recently was given a sumi-e and would love to know what the writing means. To be honest, I am a complete amateur, so am not even sure if the writing is Kanji or Chinese. Further, I would love any information, or even subjective opinions, regarding the style, era, and quality (I will not be offended if it turns out the painting is simply a copy, pale imitation, or kitsch designed for tourists). As a unrelated final request, I am interested in purchasing, albeit on a pretty tight budget, other scroll paintings, and am wondering if anybody happens to know of some good galleries and/or antique stores in New York City. Images are attached below, and thanks for helping. Sorry for all of the questions.

Sure, this is a Japanese painting in Chinese style, likely mid 20th century or a few decades earlier. Kanji is simply the Japanese name for Chinese characters that the Japanese adopted, but you are right, the inscription which seems to be a poem includes none of the Japanese syllabary (hiragana/katakana).

The last column of text includes a reference to the artist, who is using a pen name 秋水 (literally autumn waters) and says that he is 70 years old at the time "in the winter of his years" if I am reading correctly. the first seal corroborates the pen name, I can't read the second.

The style of ink dots in the hills is loosely based on the lineage of Chinese painter Mi Fu and his son Mi Youren. As here Japanese painters often repeat the dotting in their foreground foliage, which to me doesn't really unify the painting, though I assume that is the artist's intention. See also somewhat similar landscapes by Chinese painter Zhu Da, aka Bada Shanren.

This is not a great painting but is genuine (not a fake or copy that I cant tell) and represents Japanese taste in Chinese style. The artist is likely quite minor but others may be able to comment as I don't know Japanese painting well.

I don't know of dealers in NY selling inexpensive Japanese paintings; others may. One high end dealer on the upper east side is Kaikodo; check their website. Instead you can do quite well on ebay. There are reliable Japanese sellers and you can find good quality paintings, albeit often with a bit of damage, whether to the mounting or water damage to the painting surface, for $100+/-

Thank you very much Rat. I appreciate the references to the Chinese painters who may have influenced this work. It is really useful to compare those masterpieces with this less successful work (which I still love, if only for being the first scroll painting I purchased) particularly when they have similar formal approaches.

Two more questions regarding the specific techniques. You mentioned that Japanese paintings using the ink dot style tends to seek to unify, or at least harmonize, background with foreground. Is this a distinctive trait of Japanese painters, or can it be seen in Chinese painting as well?

Secondly, one thing that interested me in this painting was the three distinct styles used in representing the mountains. On viewer's left is a mountain consisting solely of ink dots without any outline. In the center the mountain has the same brush strokes but with a drawn border, and on the right the mountain is almost perfectly smooth and uniform. Was this a particular style for demonstrating perspective/distance?

One final question, do you happen to know of a good English-language book or website that would serve as a useful introduction to Chinese and Japanese scroll painting. It is a big, and slightly intimidating, field, so I would love to establish a firm foundation of knowledge. Plus, I do not want to abuse your time or generosity, so hopefully next time I can answer these types of questions by myself. Thanks again.
-N

Some Chinese painters use smaller "vegetation" dots for a similar integrative purpose. Yuan painter Ni Zan was one of them, as this picture in the Metropolitan shows (http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/45636). In fact despite the Met's blurb praising the picture I see it as a less successful work than they do, because to me the artist relies far too heavily on the integrative properties of the vegetation dots: look at the hills on the far shore and imagine them without any of the dots at all. When you do so, I think you will sense that the result would be surprisingly amorphous, and Ni was a fastidious artist (and person), so that is rather uncharacteristic of him.

In general though use of such tools to integrate foreground and background seems more blatant among Japanese artists, who seem to enjoy toying with the notion of two- versus three-dimensional space more than Chinese artists did. I hesitate to generalize about Japanese painting because I know much less about it, but in my experience Japanese painters relative to Chinese painters seem more interested in surface pattern than in the illusion of three dimensional space.

I agree that atmospheric perspective is the likely explanation for the way the hills are rendered in your picture.

Am not qualified to recommend books on Japanese painting other than those you can find easily enough online, but on the China side would recommend a couple of very inexpensive books that cover the basics while also being extremely informative. One is Jerome Silbergeld's Chinese Painting Style. James Cahill's Chinese Painting is old but still good for a view of leading artists, genres, and stylistic developments. Wan-go Weng is editor of a very cheap collection of pictures, all now in the Metropolitan (which has excellent collections of early Chinese and Japanese painting), called Chinese Painting and Calligraphy: A Pictorial Survey. Simply rifling through the pages of this book gives you an immediate appreciation for the diversity and range of styles Chinese artists developed using simple (but hard to master) brush and ink. Find some that you like, whether Chinese or Japanese, and go from there. (another book I particularly like but which you will not find as readily as those above is Wang Yaoting, Looking at Chinese Painting, which conveys Chinese aesthetics--particularly aspects of brushwork--more strongly than these other works do)

Don't hesitate to ask questions, your interest in the art itself is a welcome alternative to the constant stream of thrift store flippers that frequent this site hoping to have stumbled onto a treasure.

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