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Japanese paintings on silk from the 1930s

The purpose of theses pages is to make a brief inventory of a specific kind of silk paintings found on internet (presumably from the 1930s), for identification purposes. Are they collector items or only of decorative value? Such paintings are often found on online auction sites. Sometimes the same painting (with minor differences) can bear different signatures, one then wonders who copied whom.

Paintings by famous artists like Uemura Shoen (1875-1949), whose signature is well known, are not presented here, as they do not need to be identified.

The images shown here are generally of poor quality, because most of them were taken by amateurs, often through the glass of the frame and not face on. Most images were found on auction sites like ebay, and, except for Ishikawa Kiyohiko, the artist is never identified on these websites. Thus the difficulty in finding out who these artists are. In this context, I thank Alec Wood for help in reading the signatures. None of these images were found on museum or institutional sites, so one really wonders if these paintings are valuable or just mass productions for foreign tourists.

Click on the images to access the pages.

Paintings by Ishikawa Kiyohiko
Paintings by other artists
Paintings of Madonnas and child
Cases of plagiarism