Yi In-yeop Portrait

These are two portraits depicting Yi In-yeop (1656–1710), a civil official of the late Joseon period. Yi In-yeop's clan seat was Gyeongju, and his pen name was Hoewa. Two versions of his portrait survive: a full-length portrait in official court dress and a half-length portrait in scholar's dress. The two share the same facial features but differ in costume, suggesting that several portraits were copied from a single facial template. The official-dress portrait shows him seated full-length in a chair, wearing a samo cap and a dark blue dallyeong, a round-collared official robe. His two hands are clasped together inside his long, drooping sleeves. His rank badge is a paired-crane badge of senior second rank, worn with a gilt openwork belt, and the strongly green-toned robe is finely painted with cloud patterns. The image shows a markedly flat tendency, with almost no sense of three-dimensional volume following the contours of the body. The face is turned slightly to the right, its features outlined in fine lines and then coloured in. At the upper right of the painting is written the inscription "Royal Relief Inspector Lord Yi In-yeop." At the age of forty-two, in 1697, the twenty-third year of King Sukjong, Yi In-yeop was dispatched as a royal relief inspector to examine famine conditions in Pyeongan Province. The scholar-dress half-length portrait shows him wearing a square cap and a straight-collared robe, with a red sejodae, a narrow silk sash worn by officials of dangsang rank, tied at the waist. The shape and expression of the face are similar to those in the official-dress portrait, but the shading, concise linework, and the lively rendering of the beard and eyes bring vitality to the figure. The Yi In-yeop portraits show transitional features combining new techniques, such as the shading method that appeared around 1700, with the traditional style of portraiture. Their main features include the tall samo cap, the depiction of facial features through outline drawing, and the absence of a painted patterned rug on the floor, all characteristic of portraits from before the 18th century. The Yi In-yeop Portrait is a representative example of the typical scholar-official portrait of the late Joseon period.

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Where it is

Region

Yongin, Gyeonggi

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산