Why Does a Kakemono Often Bear the Signature of an Artist Long Deceased

One unrolls a kakemono, lays it flat on the table, and the eye almost wanders down on its own. There stands a narrow column of characters, below it a red seal, hardly bigger than a postage stamp. One types the name into a search engine – and reads that this painter died in 1837. Then one looks again at the dating of the hanging scroll: Shōwa period, so at the earliest 1926. Nearly a century lies between the two.

Both are stated as such, and neither is a typo. Nor is the case rare. Among the hanging scrolls we currently have available and to which a named artist is attributed, in almost half the stated period begins only after his year of death. Anyone noticing this for the first time thinks of fraud. The actual explanation is more interesting – and it leads right into an understanding of copying that differs markedly from the European one.

Two Statements That Speak to Two Different Things

The date of creation and the artist name do not answer the same question. The period attribution describes the object: the paper or silk on which it was painted, the colors used, the condition of the picture support, the type of mounting. It is an assessment of the thing lying in front of you. The artist name, on the other hand, reflects what appears on the painting – which signature was set and which seal was stamped.

These are two independent statements, and that is why they can diverge. A shop that reports both honestly will inevitably show a contradiction now and then. The alternative would be to silently resolve the tension: either making the object older than it is, or omitting the name that, after all, does appear on it. Both would be more convenient, and both would be more dishonest. Anyone who wants to buy an antique kakemono should therefore read these two lines separately – one says how old the piece presumably is, the other, whose name appears on it.

How to Tell the Age of a Hanging Scroll – and How Not To

A common misconception concerns the mounting. A kakemono consists of the actual image, the honshi (本紙), and the surrounding mounting of paper and silk brocade. This mounting is a wear part: hanging scrolls are traditionally remounted roughly every one to two hundred years, because the adhesive and fabric fatigue and crease lines become fixed. A fresh, flawless silk around a painting therefore says almost nothing about the age of the painting itself – it may simply mean that an old work has been well cared for. Conversely, a shabby mounting does not prove great age.

What is telling is the picture support itself. Paper and silk age visibly: the tone grows warmer, foxing spots appear, and over the decades the ink migrates minutely into the fibers, losing its sharp edge. The colors are even more precise indicators. Prussian blue reached Japan via Nagasaki at the end of the 18th century – the earliest documented sale dates to 1782 – and came into wide use from the 1830s onward. The synthetic aniline dyes followed much later: the first, mauveine, was discovered in England in 1856, and in Japan such dyes cannot be documented before the 1860s. A brilliant magenta on a supposedly early Edo-period painting is therefore no longer merely a suspicion, but a date.

The signature itself also carries a date. From the 11th century onward, the court granted outstanding painters honorary ranks that had actually been reserved for Buddhist clergy: Hokkyō (法橋), above that Hōgen (法眼), and above that Hōin (法印). Anyone who held such a rank included it in his signature – and because a rank was conferred at a specific point in time, it narrows down the year of creation. On the hanging scroll whose signature column you see in the image accompanying this article, the line ends in exactly this way: with the rank Hōgen and the character 筆 – "painted by."

Copying Was the Curriculum, Not the Fraud

To understand how an old name ends up on a young painting, one must know how Japanese painters were trained. For centuries, the funpon (粉本) stood at the center of this training: collections of copies that a workshop compiled, guarded, and passed down through generations. Workshop students rarely ever got to see originals by old masters. What they studied instead were the copies made by their own master, which served as a style manual – motif by motif, brushstroke by brushstroke.

The Kanō school, which determined Japan's official painting from the 15th to the 19th century, brought this system to perfection. Those who trained there copied for years before designing anything of their own, and mastery of the inherited repertoire was considered the true skill. That later critics saw precisely this as the reason for the school's rigidity is part of the story. The counter-movement is also revealing: when Maruyama Ōkyo introduced shasei (写生), drawing from nature, in the 18th century, this was considered an innovation – a clear sign of just how much copying had until then been taken for granted as the normal case.

A painter who painted a Kanō landscape around 1900 was therefore not doing anything disreputable. He was doing exactly what he had been trained to do, in the formal language that was the only one he had learned.

Utsushi: The Copy as a Bow

Japanese has several words for copying, and they mean different things. Mosha (模写) is the faithful reproduction. Hō (倣) means "in the manner of" and often stands explicitly in the inscription on the painting – "after Sesshū" is then not a concealment, but a statement: the painter declares whose lineage he places himself in. And then there is Utsushi (写し), the term that lies furthest from the European idea of a copy.

Utsushi means a taking-up-again that is at once appropriation and a bow. The one copying enters into a conversation with the master of the past: he makes that master's technique, material, and aesthetic decisions his own, and in doing so connects his own time with an earlier one. This is expressly distinguished from mere reproducing, Mozō (模造). In tea culture, Utsushi is entirely common – successive tea masters deliberately take up objects that their predecessors treasured, in order to use them in a new way.

Against this background, it is not a curiosity but a form of respect when a student paints after his teacher, or when a painter sets the seal of the master whose hand he carries forward. This also has an economic sense: a copy identified as such is the accessible path to a motif that would otherwise remain out of reach in the original. Those who wish to buy Japanese calligraphy will regularly find, among the hanging scrolls, copies written by a practiced hand that nevertheless remain in the low hundreds of dollars.

When a Name Means the Workshop, Not the Hand

Even where the signature and the lifetime match, the matter is less clear-cut than it appears. In Edo-period workshop painting, the master designed the composition – particularly for large formats – while the assistants executed details and applied color. It was nonetheless signed only with the master's name. On surviving works of the Kanō workshop, several hands can be identified side by side, especially in the backgrounds. This was no secret and was not considered a shortcoming: the name stood for the workshop, which vouched for the result.

Added to this is the fact that names travel in Japan. A teacher would confer upon his students an artist name containing a character from his own name. In the Utagawa school, Toyokuni passed on the character "kuni" – from it came Kunisada and Kuniyoshi; Kuniyoshi in turn passed on "yoshi" to his students, among them Yoshitoshi. Anyone who knows this system reads a signature differently: it reliably places a work within a lineage and a workshop – who actually held the brush, it states only approximately.

Something similar applies to names passed down through generations. If a workshop continues to carry its founder's name, the same signature can appear across a hundred years without anything about it being incorrect. In Japanese ceramics this principle is even more visible, as the generation number is usually noted on the wooden box as well.

Why a Master's Seal Appears on a Much Later Painting

For the case at issue here – an old name, a more recent painting – essentially four paths come into question. First: the painter applied signature or seal as a reference, the way one quotes a sentence. Second: a workshop continued working under its founder's name after his death. Third: someone later added a name to an unsigned painting – in the trade, this was indeed sometimes done with an eye to the price. Fourth: it is a printed reproduction in which the seal was simply printed along with the rest.

Which of these paths applies in an individual case can almost never be reconstructed a hundred years later. The intention of a person who held a brush in hand in 1930 is not a finding one can read off an object. What can be read off is the object itself: whether painted or printed, on what support, with what colors, in what quality.

Some hanging scrolls in our inventory state exactly this in their description. Sometimes two seals bear the names of well-known Kanō masters, while the state of preservation clearly points to the later Shōwa period – the painter, presumably himself from within the circle of the school, thereby paid tribute to the masters of the past. It also happens that the description states literally that the work bears the stamps of two Kanō painters but does not originate from them itself. Such sentences cost sales arguments. They are nonetheless the only version that one can still stand behind in good conscience a year later.

Is such a hanging scroll a forgery, then?

In most cases, that word doesn't fit. Forgery is a statement about intent: someone meant to deceive. That intent is practically impossible to prove for a painting from the year 1930, and the more obvious explanations – training, workshop tradition, homage to the teacher – cover the field fairly well. Anyone who declares every hanging scroll bearing an older name a forgery is, moreover, applying a category drawn from a different art history. In a painting culture where copying was the curriculum for centuries and Utsushi is regarded as a gesture of respect, the opposition of original and forgery simply misses the material.

Where the boundary actually runs is elsewhere: between a work painted by hand and a reproduction. A hand-painted hanging scroll is a one-of-a-kind, regardless of what name appears on it and in which decade it was made. A print is an edition. Both can have their place – a print, for instance, when a famous motif would otherwise be unattainable – but both must be clearly labeled as what they are. We identify prints as prints, even when they were made in Japan, mounted in the classical manner, and pleasing to look at.

Hand-Painted or Printed: The Distinction That Really Matters

You can make this distinction yourself, and it takes little more than a magnifying glass and raking daylight. A brush stroke is never uniform: it begins with a pressure point, thins out, frays at the end, and the ink is drawn minimally into the fibers at the edges. A print, by contrast, shows an even density of color, clean edges, and, under the magnifying glass, often a grid or a fine dot pattern. High-quality processes such as collotype printing, which Kyoto workshops have used since the early 20th century for reproductions of hanging scrolls, manage without a visible grid – there, it helps to look at the structure of the support and at whether the ink has truly been drawn into the fiber.

The same applies to the seal. An actually stamped seal is made with shuniku, red cinnabar paste; it sits minimally raised, has irregular edges and small gaps where the paste did not take. A seal printed along with the image is flat, even, and identical on every copy. If you want to buy an original Japanese hanging scroll, this is the one point where it always pays to ask – not the question about the famous name, but the question of whether it was painted by hand.

What a Kakemono of This Kind Is Worth

First, what it is not: it is not a work by the famous name, and no one should pay for it as such. The premium for a secured attribution does not apply, and that is as it should be.

What remains is nevertheless considerable. A hanging scroll of this kind is a hand-painted one-of-a-kind – every brushstroke sits exactly once, and the decision of where a surface remains empty was made by a person. It is, moreover, a document: it attests that the formal language of a school was still alive around 1900 or around 1950, painted by someone who had mastered it. In many cases the painterly quality is higher than that of some contemporary signed picture, for whoever was able to execute such a thing had a long training behind them.

And finally, there is the price. A hanging scroll with a secured attribution to a significant Edo painter moves into regions that have little to do with collecting in the literal sense of the word. A carefully painted work from the Meiji or Shōwa period, continuing the same tradition, hangs on your wall for a fraction of that – and it hangs there as a unique work, not as a reproduction.

The Signature at the Bottom Edge

There is a moment when one's relationship to a picture like this changes. One stops reading the signature as a certificate of authenticity and reads it instead for what it is: a sentence. There stands a name, perhaps a rank, and the character for "painted." Written by someone who knew where he stood in the line of succession, and who wanted to make that visible. This does not make the picture smaller. It gains a second story alongside the first.

At densho.de we acquire every hanging scroll individually in Japan and describe it as it stands: what we can say about dating, we say; what is written on the picture, we render; and where the two diverge, we write that down as well. As you browse through our kakemono, take a moment to look closely at these spots. They lead to the pieces that hold more to discover than a motif.