Week 5: Seals: carved, collected, forged

Why a seal is often more informative than a signature, and how seal forgery actually gets caught.

22 March 2027

A signature is a single, repeatable gesture; a seal is a carved object with its own physical history, and that history is exactly what makes it useful. An artist’s own seals wear, chip, and are sometimes recut over a career, so a securely dated impression can be matched against a disputed one edge by edge. Collectors added their own seals as they acquired a work, so a scroll that has passed through famous hands — Xiang Yuanbian, later the Qianlong emperor — often carries a visible chain of custody stamped directly onto it. That same density of information is what makes seals worth forging: a convincing seal, carved to match a genuine impression, does more work for a fake than a convincing signature ever could, and Suzhou pian workshops carved plenty of them.

Catching a forged seal is a matching problem: comparing stone-cut edges, vermilion paste texture, and impression pressure against a securely dated reference, the same evidence-first habit as week 4 applied to a different object.

Outline#

• what a seal actually records: the artist’s own marks and every subsequent owner’s
• how seal impressions are compared and matched against a dated reference
• known cases of forged or recut seals, and what exposed them
• the attribution note is due at the end of this week: bring your working draft to seminar for a last check against a second reader