Landscape and Human Figure

Anonymous, Joseon Period Late 18th Century 

The painting bears two inscriptions. The first is a passage by Paewa Kim Sang-suk (坯窩 金相肅, 1717–1792), which reads: "Songye is my maternal uncle. His appearance was singular and antique in bearing. Though crippled in his legs, he devoted himself with single-minded absorption to a single pursuit and attained a thorough mastery of painting entirely on his own. That he came to grasp its subtleties through practice undertaken from earliest childhood, and not through the guidance of any teacher, is testament to his native gifts. (坏窩金公文日 松溪余表叔 爲人狀貌奇古 而癡獨智通於 自幼習而解其妙非有師焉)" The second is a colophon by Yi To-jae (李道在, sobriquet Ianjae 易安齋), a civil official of the reign of King Hŏnjong in the nineteenth century, which states: "This painting is refined and precise, and governed throughout by the strictest propriety of method. (此畵精齊極有規矩)" Kim Sang-suk, who was accomplished in cursive-script calligraphy, was the principal heir of the lineage of Chukcheŏn Kim Chin-gyu (竹泉 金鎭圭) and the younger brother of Right State Councillor Kim Sang-bok (金相福).

The identity of Songye, to whom the painting is attributed, remains unknown; he is thought to have been an anonymous painter of the latter half of the eighteenth century who worked primarily in the Southern School manner. Compositions of this type — a waterside scene in the manner of Ni Zan (倪瓚), featuring a scholar and his young attendant crossing a bridge toward a hill on the opposite bank — are readily encountered in such canonical painting manuals as the Gushi Huapu (顧氏畵譜) and the Jieziyuan Huapu (芥子園畵譜). The hill in the foreground recedes into the middle distance, and a broad expanse of mist is inserted between the simplified middle ground and the dominant mountain rising beyond, mitigating to some degree the otherwise planar quality of the picture surface. The work is characterized throughout by conscientious, attentive description — evident both in the meticulous rendering of the pine trees, whose tonal gradation from dark to light establishes spatial recession, and in the handling of the central peak. The pair of pines placed in the foreground merits particular attention as an unusual pictorial motif in eighteenth-century Southern School painting: it was a compositional element that had appeared frequently in the foregrounds of landscape paintings by the Angyon School (安堅派) of the early Chosŏn period, but had fallen largely out of use from the mid-Chosŏn period onward.