Eungseonsa Mountain Spirit Painting

This Buddhist painting currently hangs on the wall to the viewer's left inside Eungseonsa Temple's Daeungjeon Hall. According to the inscription recording the painting's production (hwagi), written in ink in the red panel at the bottom of the painting, a new mountain-spirit painting was made and enshrined at Anyangam Hermitage on Samgaksan Mountain, in Goyang County, Gyeongseong Prefecture (as Seoul was then called), on the eighth day of the tenth lunar month of 1914. The monk Yeonung Jeongsun served as the certifying witness, and the monk Yanghak Hyosin acted as both overseer and fundraiser for the project; the painting itself was executed by three monk-painters, Geumho Yakhyo, Hyangam Seongyeop and Yeonam Gyeongin. The picture is a rectangle slightly wider than it is tall. Pine trees rendered in the vivid jinchae colour technique run along the edges of the composition, and beneath them the Mountain Spirit is shown seated against a mountain backdrop, together with a tiger and four attendant boys. The Mountain Spirit wears what resembles a jokduri, an ornamental headpiece, fitted with a gold jade hairpin, holds a banana-leaf-shaped fan in the left hand, and sits in profile, facing toward the viewer's left. Unlike the rest of the painting, which relies chiefly on colour, the Mountain Spirit's face is rendered with a fine brush, its beard depicted hair by hair almost like a portrait; with raised eyebrows, eyes that seem to gaze intently at something, and firmly closed lips, the figure departs from the benevolent old man usually seen in mountain-spirit paintings, expressing instead the dignified authority of the mountain's presiding deity. He wears a wide-sleeved, round-collared robe trimmed with a deep vermilion collar, a curved collar-wrap of white gauze around the neck, and a green undergarment beneath. This style of dress, commonly found in late Joseon paintings of the Ten Kings of the Underworld and in official costume, is, together with armour or robes open at the chest, one of the typical costumes given to the Mountain Spirit. The red robe is densely patterned with yellow floral motifs; the left hand holds the banana-leaf fan, while the right hand is hidden within the wide sleeve. Behind the Mountain Spirit a tiger sits as if guarding him, its long tail raised and teeth bared. With its sharp claws planted firmly in the ground and both eyes wide as if snarling, the tiger stands guard over the Mountain Spirit; unlike the tigers in other mountain-spirit paintings, often drawn in the humorous manner of folk painting, this one is skilfully executed in ink-wash technique, clearly showing the painter's accomplished hand. On either side of the Mountain Spirit stand four attendant boys holding offerings. The boys wear their hair in double topknots or covered with lotus leaves, and hold peaches or offerings in their hands, in the pose of making an offering to the Mountain Spirit. The background shows a deep mountain with a waterfall cascading down, and a pine tree leaning over the Mountain Spirit from above. The mountain that usually forms the backdrop of mountain-spirit paintings is, in principle, an imagined auspicious site representing an ideal world impossible in reality; here the pine tree, a cosmic tree symbolising the axis of the universe, and the sun half-hidden by cloud are depicted, adding to the sense of numinous power. The pine tree, painted in the vivid jinchae colours, has the lush foliage commonly seen in folk painting, but in contrast to its richly coloured leaves, the trunk is rendered roughly in ink, producing a contrasting effect.

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Where it is

Region

Jongno-gu, Seoul

Designation

Cultural Heritage Material · 문화유산자료