Riding on a Donkey

Yi Bul-hae, Joseon Period 16th Century (1529~?)

Yi Pul-hae's courtesy name was T'aewan (太緩), and his most celebrated surviving work is the Scholar Strolling with a Staff (曳杖逍遙圖) in the collection of the National Museum of Korea. The present painting was reproduced in black and white in the volume Korean Beauty: Landscape Painting (Part I), and ranks among the very small number of works known to be attributable to Yi Pul-hae.

The composition depicts a figure in official court robes riding a donkey across a stream, beneath a rock that juts dramatically to one side as if on the verge of toppling — a rock positioned in the upper right of the picture surface. Such an arrangement represents one of the standard compositional formulas favored by Zhe School–affiliated painters of the mid-Chosŏn period — artists such as Ham Yun-dŏk (咸允德), Yun In-gŏl (尹仁傑), and Kim Myŏng-guk (金明國) — in small-format landscape-with-figure paintings of the Riding a Donkey (騎驢圖) type. In the works of Ham Yun-dŏk and Kim Myŏng-guk, however, the figure assumes a considerably greater prominence within the composition; in Yi Pul-hae's painting, landscape occupies a substantially larger portion of the picture surface, revealing an approach that continues the tradition of early Chosŏn painting while simultaneously accommodating the newly fashionable Zhe School idiom. The figure is rendered with relative restraint and delicacy, while the rock formations are handled with vigorous, uninhibited brushwork that exploits strong contrasts of black and white; in his treatment of the landscape elements more broadly, Yi Pul-hae employs an abbreviated and economical mode of brushwork centered on graded ink wash rather than linear description. The ears of the animal the figure rides are depicted so small that it remains ambiguous whether the painter intended a horse or a donkey — a circumstance that may account for the work's appearance in Yu Pong-nyŏl's (兪復烈) Survey of Korean Painting (韓國繪畫大觀) under the alternative title Solitary Rider (騎馬獨行圖).