Hwang Jin Portrait

Hwang Jin, a military official of the mid-Joseon period, had his clan seat in Jangsu. In 1627, the sixth year of King Injo, he was awarded, together with his father Hwang Seong-won, the title of Second-Class Meritorious Subject for the Stabilisation of the State, for reporting Yu Hyo-rip's conspiracy to rebel. Hwang Jin's portrait as a meritorious subject shows him seated in a chair, his hands clasped together inside his sleeves, his body turned slightly to the right. The low-crowned official hat, the triangular flap of the official robe protruding at the right side, and the slits on both sides of the round-collared robe are features common to portraits of meritorious subjects from the seventeenth century. The outline of the face and the features are drawn with fine brown lines, and the prominent nose and cheekbones are shaded with an overlay of brown to emphasise the bone structure. Traces of chickenpox scarring are visible around the nose and cheeks. The mouth is symmetrical, while the nose is rendered in a simple, flat profile, because a technique for giving the fleshy thickness of the nose a sense of three-dimensionality had not yet been developed. Such awkward elements should be seen not as the individual painter's lack of skill but as a limitation in the expressive technique of seventeenth-century portraiture generally. The cloud patterns painted on the surface of the black robe are also applied uniformly, without regard to the folds of the drapery. The rank badge occupies an unusually large area, brightly coloured with a pair of silver pheasants and peony flowers against a background of five-coloured clouds. The belt worn is a sapgeumdae, a gold-decorated engraved belt. The coloured woollen carpet on the floor is rendered with repeated stippled dots, so as to show both its vivid colours and its distinctive texture. In terms of its iconographic features, the portrait shares many characteristics with portraits of the Jeongsa Merit Subjects of King Injo's reign. The upper and lower mounting borders of the hanging scroll are woven with floral patterns including chrysanthemums; judging from their condition, they are considered to preserve the original mounting style of the time unchanged.

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Where it is

Region

Yongin, Gyeonggi

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산