News You Can Bruise for 2007 January 16

Seth asked "an actual Chinese art historian" about the seal impressions on Chinese paintings and got a detailed answer, which I summarize:

• Some of the seals are the artist's signature, but most of them are to "situate the painting in a social context".
• Some of the impressions are made by the people who mount the work. "Chinese paintings are remounted on average every 75 years... The mounter places a seal over the edge of the seam between the old and new paper, to show when the work was done and by whom." That explains the half-impressions.
• Collectors sometimes stamped the items in their collections, as I surmised.
• Sometimes people would write a poem on a painting in response, and (I assume) stamp the poem. This might be a joint effort with the artist (he does the painting and you write a poem about it) or it might come much later. "It reveals a particular habit of mind of the Chinese literati -- that the proper response to an aesthetic experience was poetry."
• "Most important paintings made before 1700 were eventually collected by the Qianlong emperor, so they tend to all have the same distinctive big seals on them." The Qianlong emperor was also big on writing on other peoples' paintings. "Many of us think that if he were going to inscribe so many of the paintings he collected, it's a pity he wasn't either a better poet or a better calligrapher." Zing!

  This painting was given as an example. Analysis:

  The inscription on the left is by the painter, Zhao Mengfu. The one in the middle is probably by the Qianlong emperor... But also it was Qianlong who put those two seal impressions right in the middle of the painting -- disrupting the main axis of the composition, which is the gaze between the sheep and the goat. So one thing to remember is that not everyone in classical China would have approved of the way the Qianlong emperor deployed his seals!

• The practice doesn't apply to contemporary Chinese art, but "it does continue with traditional-style paintings". The artist will stamp the painting, and you can stamp it too if you like, to prove you owned it.
• Museums often do a similar thing, labelling pieces with catalog numbers and the like, usually on the back. I had considered this on one of my previous musings, but forgotten about it when writing the previous entry.

In general, metadata adds to the history of the object, and the mere act of adding metadata doesn't damage the object. But you need to be careful about how you add the metadata, because poorly-applied metadata will damage the object. The specific example given was a very Seth-ish example about what kind of glue you should use when affixing bookplates to books, but hopefully there was a subtext that you shouldn't stamp right between the sheep and the goat.

Very informative! Thanks, DrK.