Week 6: Colophons and the paper trail

Reading collector inscriptions and catalogue entries as documentary evidence, in the spirit of kaozheng textual criticism.

29 March 2027

A colophon — a later owner’s or scholar’s inscription, mounted beside or after a painting — is a documentary layer distinct from the object itself: a claim about the work, made by someone with a reputation to spend on being right. Cahill situated this kind of authentication within kaozheng, the Qing tradition of rigorous textual criticism applied to classical texts: the same evidentiary standards — who is claiming this, when, on what basis, and does it survive comparison with everything else known — carried over from verifying a text to verifying a painting.

A colophon is evidence about the painting, not proof of it: a later owner’s confident attribution, written in good faith, is only as reliable as that owner’s own eye, and history has several colophons confidently attached to the wrong painter. This week treats colophons and catalogue entries as a chain that has to be read critically at every link, not accepted at the strongest-sounding one.

Outline#

• what a colophon is, and why it’s a claim rather than a fact
• kaozheng as a method: provenance chased and cross-checked like a textual variant, not accepted at face value
• a case where a spurious inscription held for two centuries before being overturned
• what this closes off before the break: materials, brushwork, seals and colophons are now all in the toolkit