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Subject:Re: Help identifying Japeness scroll
Posted By: rat Mon, Sep 18, 2017
You might be right about the early 20th century dating, but the vibrancy of the color seems unusually strong for a picture that old. It is Chinese though rather than Japanese, and it includes a false signature of a Five Dynasties painter named Xu Xi, as well as a fake imperial seal in upper right. Xu was associated with colorful and decorative bird and flower paintings, but surviving works of that type attributed to him are all much more recent than his time, though some might date as early as Ming. (Yours does not.)
There is one other painting of extremely high quality that is old and dark now that has been associated with Xu's name: "Snow Bamboo" in the Shanghai Museum. It is completely different from the decorative works more recent people associate with him though: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_14b3d4d590102x5dy.html
One obvious aspect of this painting his how naturalistic it is, even though the broken, wavy bamboo stem and the flat appearance of the garden rocks are almost entirely unnatural. Another interesting feature is that some previous owner wrote an upside down inscription on one of the bamboo stems near the rock, that the painting is worth 100 pieces of gold (however that much was worth whenever the inscription was written). The third and to me most interesting aspect of this painting is that the entire thing is painted in negative space: the objects that look the lightest are those that are unpainted (or lightly painted); everything that is dark in this picture is where ink has been applied in varying degrees of intensity. Subtle and masterful
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