星湖 李瀷의 繪畵觀

Abstract

Yi Ik (李瀷, 1681~1763), a great scholar in the eighteenth century of Choson, has been regarded as a pioneer who realized and introduced the importance of realistic description and utilization of western perspective. It is true that Yi Ik showed some distinctive attitude toward painting when he referred to realism and perspective. As this study discloses, however, Yi Ik was still fond of appreciating traditional literati-paintings such like bamboo painting and landscape paintings and he could not comprehend the most basic principles of western perspective. Yi Ik suggested two functions of painting; one is practicality and the other one is appreciating. According to Yi Ik, the most practical one is portrait with which scholars express their respect to the Confucian sages or his own ancestors and the most appreciating one is landscape painting which describe the scenes of the famous Confucian sages. Yi Ik enjoyed the works of art in a traditional sense, admiring the intrinsic meaning(yi 意) beyond appearance of a painting. His favorite painters were Kim Myong-guk(金明國), Yi Jong(李霆), Yu Dukjang(柳德章), Kang Sehwang(姜世晃) and Chinese Dong Chichang(董其昌) and Su Shi(蘇軾). All of them are traditionally famous for literati painting, except for Kim Myongkuk who was treated with great favor by the eighteenth scholars of Choson because of his artistic or spiritual brushwork. Yi Ik’s traditional attitude revealed when he let painters make reproductions of various paintings. Yi Ik was interested in the newly introduced western painting and tried to understand the way of making the perspective, but he confessed the difficulty of comprehension. Yi Ik could not discern the basically different way of western perspective from the traditional paintings of Choson. In his view, a landscape painting in the Mid of Choson is sufficient to have the principles of western perspective. One of the remarkable attitudes Yi Ik showed was his strong insistence of realistic description of painting, calling it as xing shi(形似, to paint object’s appearance as it is) or xie zhen(寫眞, to copy the real). However, the example Yi Ik suggested for xing shi and xie zhen was a bamboo image in ink by Su shi, the most typical literati style of painting. This study shows that the seemingly pioneering contribution by Yi Ik in the process of introducing western painting in the late Choson was very limited and so this study warns that the application of Yi Ik’s painting theory to explanation of the paintings in the late Choson must be concerned of this limitation.