Minkyu Shin

The 1935 Sketch for the Portrait of King Sejo created by Kim Eun-ho(金殷鎬) is one of a few Royal portraits, which allows us to identify a face completely. In the portrait, King Sejo gives a young and mild impression and it clashes with a long-standing image of King Sejo, or a historical memory where he was the monarch of the rule by force who seized the throne of his nephew. Therefore, it has drawn an attention of the public. On the other hand, there is an academic research assuming it is the unfinished version since the expression of the face is flat and rough. Considering that the face seems to have been damaged and changed in the process of transmission and have become far from the actual image of King Sejo, however, this Sketch is the completed version as the ‘Sketch’ in face. Such situation can be examined by the history of destruction conservation of the Portrait of King Sejo.
The Portrait of King Sejo, originally produced in the mid-15th century, had suffered severe damage and deterioration over time since Imjin War and Manchu war. Its repair works were done four times between 1637 and 1713. During the works much restoration has been done for the rest of the part except for the face including supplementation of missing strokes or coloring, whereas, only preservation has been done for the face without restoration. There was no reference for restoration of the original face since the Portrait of King Sejo was the only version in those days. In addition, there was strict principle of “Ilhobulsa”(一毫不似, meaning literally that ‘it is not the same person if a single hair is not the same as his hair’) for portraits. Therefore, no one could dare to restore by imagination.
In 1735, under the judgement that repair was not useful anymore, it was decided to produce a copy in order to preserve the image. Historical records show that focus was put on copying the damaged face of the original as it was. However, restoration was done for some missing strokes in a way of respecting the authenticity. That is, its image came to be distanced from that of the original due to the damage at first and the subsequent modification by copying. And then, in 1935, Kim Eun-ho copied the version of the 1735 copy. The reason why there are few wrinkles and beards on the face of the 1935 Sketch for the Portrait of King Sejo is that strokes were missing by prior damage and there was no imaginary restoration of them in the process of repair·copy. Hence, facial image of King Sejo left at Sketch for the Portrait of King Sejo represents historical traces on which the portrait of King Sejo has been preserved and transmitted as well as it is the material evidence that allows us to get a sense of the ideas and aesthetics on the portrait by the contemporary people in those days.

Paintings drawn by westerners or mixed with Chinese and western drawing techniques were imported into Joseon in its late period through the travel to Beijing by an envoy. It had a great effect on painting styles and techniques in the Joseon Dynasty but there are few empirical data on imported paintings, inevitably resulting in less related studies. Hence, Oil portrait of Park Hoe-su, which is the only extant portrait of the Joseon envoy drawn by a westerner and manufactured in China, has the significant value for material in researching the history of sino-Korean relation and of eastern-western art exchange.
Park Hoe-su (朴晦壽) seems to have a westerner draw this painting during the travel to Beijing in 1833 so it may be regarded as the oldest in oil portraits of Joseon people. Its value for material holds good for researching Chinese oil portraits in the early 19th century since there are few related data even in China.
As a characteristic of this painting, it was kept by attaching to a square fringed wooden box. Oil painting may be damaged owing to a material characteristic if kept in a scroll. Hence, a protective box was made in a form of wooden case (木龕) for keeping an ancestral tablet and functionality of the portrait of the deceased could be maintained with fringe on wooden case. Chinese oil paintings were mainly manufactured and kept into a folding screen. However, in the Joseon Dynasty, portraits were used mainly for a ritual so it seems that keeping method for an ancestral tablet having a function identical to it was borrowed.

Portraits of Bosa gongsin (an honorary title granted by the King to meritorious officials who successfully led a political reversal in 1680) has underwent a sequence of production, destruction, and re-production over the course of continuous political reversals (in 1680, 1689, and 1694) during the reign of King Sukjong (r. 1674-1720). This essay examines political implications inherent in the portraits to argue that two kinds of memory— commemoration of a dead person and remembrance of a political disaster, both having been rekindled by the destruction of the images—are reflected in Portrait of Gim Seok-ju and Portrait of Gim Man-gi.
The destruction of the Bosa gongsin portraits in 1689 stands for the fall of the Western faction, whereas the re-production of the paintings in 1694 is indicative of the group’s political reinstatement. At the time of the re-production did an issue arise involving verisimilitude of the portrayals, however, because the sitters—meritorious subjects—have been dead for years.
The partisan coterie tried to settle the issue by putting reliance on portrait drafts, used earlier, and painter’s imagination. The members of the faction sought ostensible justification from a moral and ritual cause, but their true intention was to lick political wounds and to revive the glory of the old days through offering a valid ritual performance to their factional antecedents.
Displaying some inf luence from Qing dynasty portraits, the Portrait of Gim Seokju holds an important position in the history of Joseon portrait for its distinctive artistic formation and expression. While the painting has previously carried many questions concerning its nationality, date, and author, a close examination of the painting’s style and literary sources leads to an argument that Jo Se-gul (1636-after 1705) and Song Chang-yup (dates unknown) painted it together in 1694. This study also argues that the caricature-like rendition of Gim’s face and the unnatural depiction of his eyebrows in specific, which have long been considered inscrutable, are in fact a result of endeavors to achieve lifelikeness from the absence while producing posthumous portraits. In other words, the facial features, which had distinguished Gim Seok-ju in his lifetime, went through graphic exaggeration, I argue, in order to give an impression of verisimilitude to the pictorial representation for which visual memories of the deceased were the only source at the time when the earlier image has already gone.
The original Portrait of Gim Man-gi by his son Gim Jin-gyu (1658-1716) in 1680 was not able to escape destruction in the year of the political turmoil 1689, either; and the surviving painting is a re-production by a nameless artisan in 1694. Probably the assignment of the work to the artisan painter resulted from Gim’s decision that he would no longer brush, the announcement made after having experienced political hardships as well as severe incidents occasioned by a serious slip of the pen. Instead, Gim Jin-gyu transcribed a royal encomium to the portrait, which King Sukjong has bestowed on a separate sheet of paper, onto the portrait scroll itself. The royal eulogy adds to the visual grandeur of the scroll and reinforces a signification intrinsic to the remaking of the portrait, that is to say the political reinstatement.
Gim Jin-gyu’s transcription is not merely for its content but itself a tracing copy of every character in the King’s writings: perhaps he hoped that the transference of the permanence and immortality, the virtues indwelling to royal literary outputs, would prevent the portrait of his father from any future damage. A visual signifier denoting the honor of the meritorious official, the King’s writing is on the other hand an inscription with which Gim Jin-gyu’s personal and political afflictions are embedded.
The portraits of Bosa gongsin occupy a special place in the entire history of the Joseon portraits of meritorious officials for their making process and artistic expression. In addition, they make a representative case of interweaving the multiple threads of the personal history of an individual, the political affairs and currents, and the art history. Previous scholarships have paid limited attention to the styles and the techniques, however. This essay takes its significance by expanding the perspective and the discursive range of the portraits, drawing scholarly attention to the political nature of the images, the impact that the destruction of the images brought to a new artistic formation, and the issues of representation and verisimilitude.