Im Bang Portrait

This is a portrait of Im Bang (任埅, 1640–1724), a civil official of the late Joseon period. His clan seat was Pungcheon and his pen name was Sucheon. The portrait shows him from the waist up, wearing a samo, a black official hat, and a dallyeong, a round-collared official robe, with a rank badge of a pair of cranes on the robe. He wears a sapgeumdae, a gilt ornamental belt, and his body is turned slightly to the right. It clearly displays the features typical of portraiture from the first half of the eighteenth century: a tall samo, wide ear-flaps, a somewhat deeply cut dallyeong collar, and broad sleeves. The contours and features of the face were defined with brown brushstrokes of varying thickness and tone and then coloured densely; the skin was rendered in light colour washes, shading was used for the hollows of the face, and the features and wrinkles were drawn in brown lines with contrasts of light and dark. In particular, brown wrinkle lines were drawn at the forehead, the corners of the eyes, the mouth and both cheeks, and then shaded darker still — that is, the raised areas were left light while the hollows were rendered dark, emphasising the underlying bone structure. The folds of the robe were rendered realistically and naturally, with shading added to the creases, an approach different from the linear technique of mid-Joseon portraiture. In the upper right of the painting is an inscription stating that this is a surviving leaf from the Gisajip, an album made to commemorate King Yeongjo's entry into the Giroso, the office for the kingdom's senior officials, and that it was mounted in 1744, the twentieth year of King Yeongjo's reign. Im Bang took part in this at the age of eighty. This portrait is similar in iconography and technique to the half-length portrait of Im Bang at eighty in the Gisa gyecheop, suggesting both were made from the same preliminary sketch. However, this portrait is 75.5 cm in height, larger than the corresponding image in the Gisa gyecheop, which measures 43.5 cm. This suggests it was not traced from the preliminary sketch, but made by directly copying the portrait of Im Bang in the Gisa gyecheop after viewing it.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Yongin, Gyeonggi

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산