IDENTIFYING NETSUKE

From the book, "Confident Collector," edited by John Bly in 1986

“East is East and West is West and the twain certainly do not meet over their attitude to imitation. The 19th and 19th century netsuke-shi were not regarded as artists but as craftsmen of a very low order; only rarely did they achieve any recognition for their skills. As such, they frequently did not sign their work, particularly in the 18th century. The successful carver would be unable to supply the demand for his work and would employ pupils who would copy the master’s work as closely as possible…”

“There is a trend in connoisseurship to make the mistake of believing that a netsuke carved in the style of a master and bearing his signature but which in some way is less powerful or inventive than one might expect must perforce be either the work of a pupil, partly worked by a pupil, the work of a follower, or an out-and-out work of a forgery. But great artists do not always turn out masterpieces. The muse deserts them, they have off-days, financial pressures enforces second-rate work.”

There are two levels at which a forgery may appear. One is in the rarefied atmosphere. Here a forger must provide his highly skilled carver with a model which is uncommon, or still better still unknown, give him as much time as is necessary to carve one or two meticulous copies and then sell them to collectors long on money and short on expertise. Such an operation is both expensive… and risky. At the other end of the scale is the tyro collector, the tourist after a souvenir or the small time dealer hoping for a snip. To satisfy this demand, China is supplying quantities of hand-carved netsuke in ivory, but produced in large numbers.”

“Old netsuke, those made between the late 18th century and the middle of the 19th, show over a century of natural ageing and wear to the surfaces. This will include wear to the raised portions and particularly to the cord holes. This wear is almost impossible to reproduce realistically and the forger fails to make the smaller cord exit hole display more wear than the larger hole which accommodated the knot.”

(Ivoryhound note: THIS IS WHY IT IS NECESSARY TO VIEW TRUE OLD NETSUKE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT TRUE WEAR LOOKS LIKE)

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