Hello. This red seal mark is on two woodblock prints, with no signature. Can anyone translate or identify the seal? Any help greatly appreciated. Thank you.
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Hello. This red seal mark is on two woodblock prints, with no signature. Can anyone translate or identify the seal? Any help greatly appreciated. Thank you.
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The seal shaped like a chinese tripod was often used by members of the Kanō school.
So I think you don’t have a woodblock print. Maybe it's a reproduction of a Kanō school painting.
The kanji to the left is "信" (nobu); I can’t read the kanji on the right side.
Thank you; very interesting. Fyi here is an image of the piece. It exactly matches one in FAMSF except that theirs does not have the title or the seal mark. I also would like to know what the title says, if possible.
seal : like Horst, I read the left kanji as 信, and cant read the other one.
inscriptions : 職人繪盡 Complete illustrations of tradespeople 失細工帥 arrow craftsmen (?)
the following url gives the author (Kubota Beisai 久保田米齊), the publisher (Fūzoku Emaki Zuga Kankōkai), the date (1917-1918) and the whole series of prints,
www.rrncommunity.org/items/1524#?pg=item_1524&pgi=5
The same print is attributed to Tosa Mitsuoki or Kano Yoshinobu by other websites, but the above identification can be trusted because the colophon of the book gives that information.
Thank you very much. "Tradespeople"--good to have the right search term; I was trying "people working" and "masters and servants," etc. Here is the other print that I think comes from the same series. The seal is harder to see on this one.
Hi Manu
the kanji to the right is "吉", so the seal reads "吉信" (Yoshinobu).
For the seal writing of the kanji see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%90%89
Thank you Horst. I thought that 吉 was only the upper part of a character. Yoshinobu makes sense, and suggests that these prints are reproductions of much older prints. Indeed, these tradesmen were certainly not around in 1918.
I thought so too at first, but then became convinced that the lower part should be read separately.
Before I fell asleep last night, I had an idea about the bottom part.
It could be "二世"; where "世" is divided into right and left halves.
Thank you to both responders. The information is very helpful. Here are two more prints that seem to me to come from the same source but without the seal. As shown, one has a title.
Horst, the bottom characters look more like katakana, although I have never seen katakana characters on a seal : ニヌ (ninu) on the right, and ラ (ra) on the left, whatever that could mean.
Now the prints: the first and second print are from vol.3. The last two are from vol.2 (the left one) and vol.1 (the right one)