Resting Idle under a Tree 

Yun Du-seo, Joseon Period 17th Century (1668~1715)

Yun Tu-sŏ (尹斗緖, 1668–1715) was a literati painter of the late Chosŏn period, of the Haenam Yun lineage, whose courtesy name was Hyoŏn (孝彦) and whose sobriquet was Kongjae (恭齋) or Chongae (鍾崖). Since the time of his great-grandfather, the eminent poet-official Kosan Yun Sŏn-do (孤山 尹善道), the Haenam Yun family had been affiliated with the Kiho Southerner (南人) scholarly faction. As the political arena was dominated by the Noron wing of the Westerner faction, and factional strife ran deep, Yun Tu-sŏ — having passed the preliminary civil examination as a chinsa in 1693 — chose not to seek official appointment and devoted his entire life to scholarship and the arts of painting and calligraphy. Residing in the Yŏnhwabang quarter of Seoul (present-day Myŏngdong), he maintained a lifelong friendship with Yi Sŏ (李漵), elder brother of the Sirhak philosopher Sŏngho Yi Ik (星湖 李瀷), and cultivated close intellectual and artistic bonds with Sim Tŭk-gyŏng (沈得經), Yi Ha-gon (李夏坤), Yi Man-bu (李萬敷), Yi Hyŏng-sang (李衡祥), Yi Sa-ryang (李師亮), and Min Yong-hyŏn (閔龍顯), through which associations he opened new horizons in both learning and art. A man of deep scholarly temperament, he was disinclined toward broad social intercourse and spent his years in quiet retirement devoted to study. Beyond orthodox Neo-Confucianism, he pursued — in the spirit of encyclopedic learning that had become a family tradition since Yun Sŏn-do — the fields of astronomy, geometry, military strategy, medicine, cosmology, geography, divination, painting and calligraphy, seal carving, and music; yet in each domain he sought not mere knowledge but a rigorous, investigative understanding verified through precise research and personally embodied through practice — a disposition wholly consonant with the empirical spirit of Sirhak. So progressive was his intellectual character that he even read popular vernacular fiction, a genre regarded as unseemly by the standards of his time. This scholarly rigor and progressive temperament found clear expression in his approach to painting and calligraphy as well. Recognizing the limitations of a painting world in which the academic court manner, sustained by professional painters such as Kim Myŏng-guk (金明國) and Yi Jing (李澄), had come to predominate, he worked consciously to establish the authenticity and elevated standard of the literati painting tradition, while pursuing new methods and styles grounded in Western cultural currents and other newly introduced intellectual and aesthetic movements.

Yun Tu-sŏ was particularly accomplished in landscape, narrative figure painting, and the painting of horses, and demonstrated exceptional mastery across a wide range of pictorial genres, extending to self-portraiture, genre painting, and still life — categories of a distinctly new character. His landscape and narrative figure paintings contributed to the creation of a restrained, unaffected literati manner through their emphasis on the balanced management of ink. In the painting of horses, his commitment to direct observation yielded images simultaneously faithful to nature and filled with vital energy. His distinctive pictorial philosophy — founded on fidelity to observed reality and objective description — led to works such as his self-portrait and still lifes that reflect an experimental engagement with Western pictorial conventions; his Sirhak-inflected concern for lived reality found its natural expression in genre painting as a new subject category. Through this sustained pursuit of diverse new approaches, he played a leading role in shaping the emergent directions of the late Chosŏn painting world. The essay on painting (Hwap'yŏng, 畵評) included in his collected writings, Kijul (記拙), is considered — brief as it is — the most systematic statement of painterly theory among all known Chosŏn period writings on the subject. In calligraphy as well, working in concert with his lifelong intimate Yi Sŏ of Okdong, he proposed a new script style — designated the Tongguk Chin'che (東國晋體), the "True Style of the Eastern Kingdom" — rooted in the calligraphy of Wang Xizhi (王羲之), the supreme master of the Chinese Six Dynasties period; this contribution brought about a significant transformation in the late Chosŏn world of calligraphy. Because he regarded himself as a painter by avocation, he produced works in limited number and was not in the habit of distributing them freely, with the result that surviving examples are comparatively rare. Nevertheless, during the first half of the eighteenth century he enjoyed a reputation that for a time surpassed even that of Chŏng Sŏn, and in the nineteenth century, as interest in the expressive and idea-centered mode of literati painting deepened, he came once again to be honored as the presiding master of the literati painting tradition.

Scholar at Rest beneath a Tree (樹下閑逸圖) depicts an old fisherman taking his ease in the shade of an ancient tree. The composition follows a kind of two-register structure that retains a trace of the compositional conventions of the mid-Chosŏn period, and may simultaneously be understood as a variation on the two-register format associated with Ni Zan, whose manner Yun Tu-sŏ had on occasion explored in homage paintings. The work gives eloquent expression to the defining qualities of the literati mode: an expansive compositional ease; an ink tonality that is restrained and touched with a quality of dryness; brushwork that is fluent yet entirely free of artifice; and the quietly suffused effect of color washes delicately tinged with ink, applied in subtle gradations. The work bears the inscription Yun Hyoŏn-jak (尹孝彦作) and a vermilion square seal reading Kongjae (恭齋) carved in seal script. The inscription to the left of the picture surface was written by the literati painter Yun Che-hong (尹濟弘, 1764–after 1840), who declared the ancient manner superior to the modern style and assessed Yun Tu-sŏ's painting as a work that admirably embodies the ancient manner. On the white border surrounding the picture, O Se-chang (吳世昌, 1865–1953) added his own inscription together with a white-text square seal reading Se-chang (世昌) and a vermilion square seal reading Wich'ang (韋昌), indicating that the work was formerly in his collection; his additional notation "Inscribed by Yun Che-hong" (尹濟弘題) attests to the high regard in which this painting was held by later painters and collectors alike. The inscription reads: "The flourishing of painting and calligraphy in our Eastern kingdom extends across several hundred years. Yet here and there, the ancient manner prevails over the modern style — and this scroll, too, is admirable in its own right. Written by Yun Kyŏng-do. (我東書畵之盛直數百年、然達達有古法勝近體、若此幅亦自好 尹景道書)"