Portrait of Yi Si-bang

Yi Si-bang (1594–1660) was the second son of Yi Gwi (1557–1633), Prince Yeonpyeong and one of the leaders of King Injo's restoration, and the younger brother of Yi Si-baek (1581–1660), Prince Yeonyang. Following his father and elder brother, Yi Si-bang took part in King Injo's restoration in 1623 at the age of thirty; he was ranked second among its Meritorious Subjects and enfeoffed as Prince Yeonseong. He later served several times as panseo, head of one of the Six Boards, and in the autumn of the first year of King Hyeonjong's reign (1659) served as Panuigeumbusa, head of the Uigeumbu, the tribunal that handled major state offences. Six portraits of Yi Si-bang survive today among his descendants in Daejeon; they are said to have originally been enshrined mainly in the ancestral shrine at Hongseong, where his descendants had long resided. Three of them depict him as a young man of thirty at the time of the 1623 restoration, when he was recorded as a Meritorious Subject. Among these, one full-length portrait in official robes shows the typical form and technique of meritorious-subject portraiture of the early seventeenth century, and is thought to be the original portrait of Yi Si-bang as a Meritorious Subject of the Restoration. A small half-length portrait with the same iconography is thought to have been copied, somewhat roughly, from part of this meritorious-subject portrait, in order to enshrine an image of Yi Si-bang at Seongbong Seosa (also known as Seongbong Seowon) in Mokdong-myeon, Gongju, the site of the shrine to Yi Gwi, Prince Yeonpyeong. A single oil-paper sketch is thought to have been drawn from the full-length portrait when this half-length bust portrait was painted. A further group of three portraits shows him as an old man, with almost identical facial features: two are paper sketches of a bust portrait, and the remaining one is a formal half-length portrait painted on silk based on these sketches. Of these, only the full-length portrait in official robes, which best shows the style of seventeenth-century meritorious-subject portraiture, is designated a treasure. Dimensions (height x width): 169.0 x 93 cm (painting), 224.0 x 106.3 cm (overall).

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Yuseong-gu, Daejeon

Designation

Treasure · 보물