Sim Sa-jŏng (沈師正) was a literati painter of exceptional accomplishment in the genres of flower-and-bird, animal, and insect painting, and this work — in which the large axe-cut texture strokes (taebubŏkjun) he is said to have employed from his middle years are deployed with bold confidence across the landscape background — stands as one of his most representative paintings of hawks. The inscription identifies the work as a homage after the manner of Lin Liang (林良), the Ming dynasty painter, executed in the twelfth lunar month of the kyŏngjin year. Paintings of a hawk hunting a hare had been produced as auspicious New Year's paintings (sehwa) since the early Chosŏn period, and it is generally understood that Sim Sa-jŏng created this work in the final month of the year in response to the demand for such images at the turn of the new year.

Two magpies perch on a pine branch in the upper portion of the composition, gazing down at the scene below with expressions of apparent alarm; the combination of pine and magpie is itself a pairing well suited to the conventions of the New Year's painting. The work captures the precise instant at which the hawk plunges downward toward the hare, and the encounter between the hawk's piercing gaze fixed on its quarry and the hare's expression of strained, wide-eyed resistance is rendered with a quality of warm humor. Sim Sa-jŏng appears to have been particularly fond of this subject: he returned to it in the muja year (1768) as well, in a version that additionally includes two pheasants in the lower portion of the composition. In the overwhelming vitality and bold painterly authority that animate the picture surface, however, that later work does not appear to equal the present painting.

Painters of the late Chosŏn period, among them Ch'oe Puk (崔北), also produced hawk paintings of this type on occasion, yet it seems rare for the tension of the moment of capture to have been seized with the same penetrating immediacy that Sim Sa-jŏng achieves here.