Multiple copies of the same bottle by inside painted artists

Hi again for the last time this morning in HK,

My reply to Pat was this:

"Sad but true. But there's not much we can do about it. Just live with it and be aware of the possibility that what we think is an original unique bottle may be just one of a series which the painter has painted over his lifetime. Some signed , some unsigned"

In fact have several more examples of this multiple copy phenomenon that are very interesting, and I will post them in the next few days. But my classic case is certainly Jiang Hongliang's Red Sun

My theory is that there are three kinds of multiple copies :

a) "practice" versions of a bottle which the artist sells off unsigned to the general market just to earn some money to survive the next month

b) "Improved" official / signed versions, after the artist has scored a hit with the first official / signed bottle when he finally showed it at an exhibition and maybe even won a prize ( = certificate of recognition)

I guess ( just guess) it's sometimes more satisfying to repeat an earlier work and try to make it even better than to create a new work , given that a large part of the effort in painting an IPB is the skill involved

c) A collector asked the artist to paint another copy of a bottle which he ( the collector) saw in a book; eg both Bill and I at different times asked one particular young Hengshui artist to paint us a copy of a beautiful bottle we both saw in CIPMA ( "Chinese Inside Painting of the Modern Age" edited by Wang Xisan , 2005 * )

In this case the bottle may either be a perfect copy, or it may be a copy "in the spirit" of the orginal with some additional flourishes at the artist's discretion . In Bill's case I think he asked this artist to paint two CIPMA-published "front face" pictures onto a new bottle, one on side A and one on side B of the new " copy" bottle .

And of course there's the case that another young artist just copies the work of a Master and sells it off unsigned to earn some pocket money. It takes a very discerning eye to spot a fake copy, as was the case of my Sun Honglin's "Stormy Sea" copy - although in that case the copy was at least signed.

Please understand that I am still a rookie collector and the more I learn the more I realise I have to learn, so I could be 100% wrong in what I wrote above. Corrections therefore gratefully accepted and noted !

At this point I turn this new string over to the Forum members for contributions

Cheers Peter @ HK ( 09.45 saturday morning over here )