Old Man under a Pine Tree

Oh Myeong-hyeon, Joseon Period 18th Century

Oh Myŏng-hyŏn's courtesy name was Tosuk (道叔) and his sobriquet Kigok (箕谷); he is said to have resided in Pyongyang. According to Yu Pong-nyŏl's Survey of Korean Painting (韓國繪畫大觀), this work was at one time included in the Sŏknongsŏwŏn (石農書苑) — the celebrated collection of the connoisseur and collector Kim Kwang-guk (金光國), one of the foremost figures of his kind in the late Chosŏn period — and reportedly bore Kim Kwang-guk's identifying notation, as did other works in the collection; for reasons now unknown, however, only the painting itself survives.

The work depicts a drunken old man leaning against an ancient pine placed at the center of the composition, in the act of fastening his sash. Paintings of inebriated scholars, or of the poet Yi T'ae-baek (李太白), were produced with some frequency from the late Chosŏn period onward, yet a solitary figure portrayed leaning against a tree in this manner is without precedent. Oh Myŏng-hyŏn left behind work primarily in the genre of figure painting with vernacular subject matter — among them the Divination Scene (占卦圖) in private collection and the Man Carrying a Jar (負甕圖) in the National Museum of Korea — and all are works of considerable quality.

The old man, his hat battered and damaged, his robe loosely disheveled, buries his face against his own shoulder as though barely able to hold himself upright, his entire body surrendered to the support of the tree. Yet his face retains an expression of perfect, unhurried contentment — a man with nothing in the world left to envy or to worry about. Holding a bamboo staff, dressed in proper formal attire, and shod in t'aesahye shoes, the old man is plainly of yangban status; and it seems clear that Oh Myŏng-hyŏn intended to use the figure of a yangban undone by drink as a means of exposing, through gentle irony, the other face of the ruling class. The face is rendered with extraordinary delicacy — every feature, every wrinkle, every hair described in fine, precise brushwork, with shading applied along the contours of the face to convey a physiognomy that is at once naturalistic and vividly individual. The folds of the garments are treated in softer, more uniformly flowing lines than the rest, a quality that connects this work to the ample, rhythmically rendered drapery of the old monk in the Divination Scene. The rough, knotted surface of the pine trunk is rendered with compelling effect through parched brushwork and dilute ink, while the pine needles are described one by one in thin, clear strokes — a deliberate and telling visual contrast. The work stands as compelling evidence that Oh Myŏng-hyŏn had attained a high level of accomplishment in both landscape and figure painting alike. The work bears a white-text square seal reading Oh Myŏng-hyŏn-in (吳命顯印).