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I am looking for any information on this piece that I purchased years ago. Signature on bottom left.
Thanks so much.

Dear Allen,

This appears to be a Chinese bird-and-flower painting (花鳥畫, huaniaohua) executed in a gongbi (工筆) manner. Yellow chrysanthemums (菊花) dominate the composition it symbolizes integrity and moral steadfastness. The small songbird introduces vitality and the arrival (or departure) of seasonal change. I do not know chinese ( I'd wish) , I am just an afro-brazilian japanese language student. The inscription is unfortunately too blurred to read From what I can make out, it appears approximately to read something like:

日日對南山 (rì rì duì nán shān)

枝枝送秋影 (zhī zhī sòng qiū yǐng)

同香 (tóng xiāng)



Translation:

Day by day, facing the Southern Mountain,
Branch by branch, sending off the autumn shadows.
Sharing the fragrance.

But, please, again, I am not confident enough in nothing of this. It is composed in the form of a short poetic inscription rather than merely a title. My impression is that it is more likely a twentieth-century work painted in the Qing court manner, maybe a Republican-period.

Best regards,
Renato from Brazil

I think you have got it, except for the very last bit: 同香 appears to be the painter's given name in Chinese characters, and the signature at lower left seems to show the romanized version of its Cantonese pronunciation, followed by the surname Chong.

I don't know how true this may be for similar forms of Japanese poetry, but Chinese couplets like this have a strict syntactical parallelism, and would be considered complete in themselves, strongly implying that 同香 is not part of the lyrical imagery but the artist's name. It would help if the seal confirmed this by including 同香 but the impression is not clear enough for me to read except for the final 堂 ("hall") character, which suggests that the painter is using his/her studio name in the seal instead. Perhaps this was painted after WW2 in Hong Kong for export.

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