Landscape

Yi Jeong, Joseon Period 16th Century (1578~1607)

Yi Jeong (courtesy name Gonggan; pen names Naong and Nawa) was from the Jeonju Yi clan. Born into a distinguished hereditary family of court painters that included his grandfather Yi Sangjwa (1465–?), his father Yi Sunghyo, and his uncle Yi Heunghyo (1537–1593), he fully inherited the unbroken tradition of painting that his family had maintained from the early Joseon period.

A professional painter, Yi Jeong studied poetry and literature under Choe Rip and cultivated deep friendships with the leading literary figures of his day, including Heo Gyun. Heo Gyun assessed his work in these terms: “In landscape, his technique derives from An Gyeon, yet is even more accomplished; in figure painting, he re-ceived the tradition from his grandfather, yet his brilliance is even more vivid.” Yi Jeong indeed inherited the An Gyeon school style that had long dominated early Jo-seon landscape painting, while also drawing broadly on the Zhe school and Southern School traditions — establishing himself as the preeminent painter of the mid-Joseon period.

These six Landscape panels depict scholars in a variety of settings, enjoying and con-templating the beauty of the natural world. The composition is characterized by the technique known as pyeonpa gudo: three panels weighted to the left and three weighted to the right alternate throughout the set, creating a rhythmic visual flow.

The seasonal progression across the panels is equally noteworthy. The first two pan-els evoke spring, the next two summer, and the final two convey the moods of au-tumn and winter respectively. This seasonal structure suggests that the set originally consisted of eight panels — perhaps in the format of Landscapes of the Four Seasons or Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers — with two panels now lost.

This interpretation is lent further support by the fourth panel, which closely resem-bles the Night Rain over the Xiao and Xiang (瀟湘夜雨圖) from Yi Jing’s Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers in the National Museum of Korea, sharing a similar treatment of mist-enveloped mountains, overall composition, and arrangement of scenic elements. The fourth panel is also notable as the only one among the six that contains no human figures: instead, a single ox rests at ease on a broad expanse of foreground bank — a motif particularly characteristic of mid-Joseon painting.

Another distinctive feature of the set is that at intervals of two panels, the image of a solitary scholar reclining in a small boat on calm water reappears in nearly identical form — a quiet refrain woven through the sequence.

Throughout all six panels, expanses of still water and drifting mist generate a sense of vast, open space. The compositions, the rendering of tree branches, and the re-peated short-stroke texture technique (單線點皴, danseonjeomjun) applied to moun-tain surfaces all reflect the An Gyeon school tradition with characteristic clarity. At the same time, the fifth panel unfolds the intimate world of small-scale landscape figure painting (小景山水人物畫), demonstrating that Yi Jeong had masterfully ab-sorbed not only his family’s inherited style but also the mid-Joseon painting currents led by contemporaries such as Yi Gyeongyun.