Landscape

Cho Seok-jin, Joseon Period 19th Century (1853~1920)

Cho Sŏk-jin (趙錫晉) was the grandson of Imjŏn Cho Chŏng-gyu (琳田 趙廷奎) and adopted the sobriquet Sorim (小琳). He was a painter of wide-ranging accomplishment, excelling not only in landscape, figure, still life with scholar's objects and flower sprays, and bird-and-animal painting, but also in the painting of fish — a specialty he inherited directly from his grandfather. This pair of hanging scrolls entitled Landscape depicts, respectively, a spring scene and a winter scene. The spring composition shows a stretch of riverbank where vacant thatched dwellings stand among dense, trailing willows, while a single boat drifts at ease upon the water. To the left of the composition, a five-character verse is inscribed that gives lyrical expression to the scene: "Soft willows lean along the sandy shore; a small skiff glides by, gently stirred. (綿柳傍汀洲 悠悠拂小艇)" The winter scene is accompanied by the couplet "Toward evening, snow begins to threaten the sky — might we share a cup of wine? (晚來天欲雪 能飲一盃無)," and renders with quiet poetic feeling the moment in which two figures seated in a thatched retreat await the arrival of a boat bearing a jar of wine, on a grey and overcast winter's day when snow seems imminent. The painting-manual–derived compositional conventions and the faithful adherence to Southern School pictorial manner displayed throughout suggest that this work belongs to a relatively early phase of Cho Sŏk-jin's career.