Namgyebaksechae Portrait

These are two portraits depicting Park Se-chae (1631–1695), a civil official of the late Joseon period. Park Se-chae's ancestral seat was Bannam, and his pen name was Namgye. Two versions of his portrait survive: one showing him in official court dress (gwanbokbon) and one in the robes of a Confucian scholar (yubokbon). In the gwanbokbon he is shown seated on a chair, facing forward, wearing a tall samo (official's cap), with both hands folded inside his sleeves in the gongsu gesture, a formal hand-clasping posture. He wears a rank badge embroidered with a single crane and a belt of rank decorated with gold leaf. A leopard skin is draped over the chair, and both feet rest on a footstool, placed in the shape of the character for "eight" (八). These are typical elements of official portraits of civil officials from around the end of the 17th century. The gwanbokbon of Park Se-chae, however, is not the original painted at the time but a later copy (imobon). The beard shows white whiskers below the nose enveloping black whiskers around the chin and lips. The disappearance of the triangular gusset at the side of the robe, a feature characteristic of mid-Joseon portraiture, indicates that this portrait was produced later than the 17th century, and the leopard skin laid over the chair is likewise a form not found before the 17th century. The Namgye Park Se-chae Portrait is therefore regarded as sharing the stylistic features of portraits from the latter half of the 17th century. The yubokbon shows him standing, facing forward, wearing a dongpagwan, a scholar's cap named after the poet Su Dongpo, with both hands clasped inside his sleeves. The dopo (scholar's robe) is rendered in a considerably exaggerated manner, and a black cord is tied over the loose everyday robe beneath and left hanging down. The bodily proportions and the colouring of the face and costume are not fully accomplished, and for this reason some regard it as the work of a painter unfamiliar with portrait painting; even so, the face gazing forward from within the voluminous robe is rendered in relatively fine detail, giving it a sense of vitality. According to the collected writings of Sin Gyeong, Park Se-chae's maternal grandson, the preliminary sketches for both the official-dress and scholar's-robe portraits of Park Se-chae were drawn by the painter Jo Se-geol, a native of Pyeongyang.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Yongin, Gyeonggi

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산