Portrait of Songsiyeol

Basic information

Designation

Treasure No.2128

Category

Painting

Era

18세기 전반

Designated year

2021

Location

제천시, 충청북도— 충청북도 제천시 의림대로47길 7 (모산동, 의림지역사박물관)

Coordinates

37.176130, 128.209516Kakao address conversion

This English description was machine-translated and may contain inaccuracies. Refer to the original Korean text for details.

The Song Si-yeol Portrait depicts the Joseon mid-period statesman and Neo-Confucian philosophy master Song Si-yeol (1607-1689), whose remarkable intellectual and political contributions influenced his era's development, transmitted through the Hwang-gang Ancestral Hall in Jecheon for over three centuries, establishing clear provenance. Despite his high-ranking official status, Song Si-yeol appears in portraiture as a pure literatus wearing a four-sided hat and literati deep robe rather than official attire. The composition's upper portion displays a painting inscription reading 'U-am Song Master's Seventy-Fourth Year Portrait' in seal script. The composition's right side features Ki-m Chang-eop's (1579-1655) portrait-assessment text written in regular script, confirming painter Kim Chang-eop created this portrait at age twenty-three depicting seventy-four-year-old Song Si-yeol in 1680. The composition's left side contains Kwon Sang-ha's (1641-1721) portrait-assessment text subsequently copied by Kwon's student Chae Ji-hong (1683-1741) in regular script, establishing the work's 1680 creation by twenty-three-year-old Kim Chang-eop from Song Si-yeol's original sketch as base work. The painting employs hanging-scroll format on seamless single-silk canvas. The portraiture depicts a gray four-sided hat with black-edged collar and black-trimmed sleeves of gray deep robe, showing hands clasped within sleeves in half-figure representation. The portraiture impressively renders Song Si-yeol's tortuous lifetime, evident through graying mustache, whiskers, and goatee, with deeply-furrowed facial creases around forehead and eyes. While long white-and-dark whiskers receive meticulous detailed handling, eyebrows appear thickly darkened, and brown-ochre coloring depicts facial creases and shading contrasting sharply with clothing rendered in dark-ink linear form—concentrated representation synthesizing Song Si-yeol's bearing, demeanor, and character. Song Si-yeol's enduring posthumous veneration produced approximately thirty portrait examples, with this work ranking among superior examples utilizing Kim Chang-eop's original sketch as foundation work, presumably produced by contemporary supreme portrait painters such as Jin Jae-hae (1691-1769), distinguishing itself as exceptional portraiture.

Location