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Hi all,
In this case my question is more 'Help me identify this myself!' (or 'help me identify items myself as much as possible in the future, so I won't bother you so much in the future' 😀 )
Is there a site where the more common seal characters can be found?
For instance, if I'm not mistaken the top seal in this image ...
... partially consists of the mark for 'horse', and I assume the character on the left is also common and I can imagine there are sites where they can be found, but all my attempts have failed so far to identify the rest of the characters... (or am I right thinking that the last seal begins with 干方?)
Marote
Sorry , I can't point you in the right direction, but I am sure there are Chinese and Japanese sites which identify known artists' seal marks, and possibly even books. But there are several problems , as far as I can see. Most seals are highly individualised (because they acted like signatures) and so can be stylised and hard to read. Often the seal uses archaic forms of the characters.
It must take a lot of experience to distinguish a real artist's seal from a fake.
As in the example posted, there are often more than one seal , and what are these others? - collectors' marks , commendation marks?
Seals on paintings are much more varied than on porcelain , where even then there are hundreds of marks.
Good luck and hope someone can help
tam
Marote,
As most of the seals you are going to find are not going to be those of famous artists, it wouldn't make sense to try to decipher the thousands of seals you are coming across. For instance, the character you refer to is "Ma" with left side a "Person radical" and right side containing sound pronunciation "Ma" or horse. So seeing that single character and looking it up it is a "Surname" for someone named Ma. The second smaller seal looks like a full name with Ma on right and left side two characters top to bottom. You are right on the bottom seal being 干方 or Gan Fang on the right, and two character top to bottom on left. Almost looks like a four character Japanese name, but what is the subject of the painting? I suggest you begin formally studying Chinese characters in your spare time as you seem to have much interest in them. Here is one site I use, but you need to learn all of the radicals in order to use the chart and it will take some amount of study....George
Hi Marote,
Wow what a task you have set yourself. Good advise from Tam and George. Just out of interest I googled Chinese painting seals and came up with the link below. 10 years work sorting that lot I reckon, however I did discover with just a short look that Seals are also know as Chops so I learned something because of your post... thanks
Michael.
Hi Tam, George and Michael,
Thank you for your help! As always very useful!
I thought I had found a useful site yesterday, with a list of characters and (many) corresponding seal characters, but unfortunately now I re-opened this site it shows 'The time allocated for running scripts has expired.' and the list is gone 😟 I hope it can still be found somewhere in the Wiktionary mazes as it had much information, with each character redirecting to it's own page, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_70 with even more information.
Unfortunately Google isn't very helpful in my search for a page with a list of the more common seal script characters or a list with the more famous artists (like the site for Ukiyo-e signatures). Most hits are for pinterest pages with a small amount of examples (and usually no additional info)
The seals I added yesterday are of this artwork
that also has this seal on the right
If I'm not mistaken, this is the same name (?) as the bottom left seal.
The left character of the top seal seems to be 大 ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7#Chinese ), and if you google 大馬, you get ' Malaysia' as a result...
The cursive text (another quest: a site where you can look up cursive text in a list or by using radicals or by writing it, and not a site where you can find cursive script by typing/ kanji) can be seen in this pic
I presume this is a modern piece, but as the characters are fairly clear, I was hoping to be able to use these characters as a test to find a site with useful info for seal and cursive script.
Marote
In the mean time the site I mentioned seems to be working again 😀 I hope it still works when you visit it.
Marote,
Now that we see the entire piece the title reads something like "Bugs swarming red fruit"
And the piece is dated with a cyclical date of "wuyin" which repeats every 60 years either 1818,1878,1938,1998. Yours probably one of the two later dates. Also the name on the right seal does match the name on the lower left seal. Correction, The first character in that name is "chien" not "gan" meaning one thousand (They are similar but clearer on the larger right) and the first two characters "chien fang" meaning everywhere or thousand places as part of a name fantasy name "Plants everywhere fellow." That's all I can come up with.
Enjoy,
George
Thank you, George, for this additional information/lesson.
It's clear that I am a complete novice (really at fetus level...)😏
Where can I find that date in the pic? I keep staring at all the characters, but recognize any of them when comparing them to the characters google gives when looking up wuyin /wu-yin (戊寅 , right?)
Marote
Yes, you have it correct with the "wuyin" and the character immediately below the wuyin is "nian" or "year."
You are improving.
George
Actually I didn't improve much, as I meant to type:
"I keep staring at all the characters, but CAN'T recognize any of them...."
戊寅 is what I found with Google as translation of wuyin, but I could't find them on the painting.
but... now with your extra hint regarding the character that follows them, and an extra search on google I hope I've spotted them..
戊寅年 are the 3 characters above the top left seal?
Marote
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