Saehyang P. Chung

The album leaf entitled "Lunch," by the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) court artist Kim Hongdo (1745-c. 1806), is one of the lesser-known pieces from his undated 25-leaf album of genre paintings. It is, however, a very distinctive work, whose subject matter and style deserve more attention than they have received (Fig. 1). Like most of the paintings in the album, this work depicts with vivid new naturalism the humble daily activities of commoners, who lived and worked in the relatively peaceful and stable agrarian society that flourished under two able kings, Yongjo (r. 1724-76) and Chongjo (r. 1776-1800). In particular, it records the simple pleasures shared by working men, who take a mid-day break from their arduous manual labor to partake of a meal that a local woman from the village has brought in her large straw basket. While the male workers eat their lunch in a mood of joy and relaxation, the woman turns her back to them and nurses her infant with an expression of warmth and contentment on her face. Sitting next to the woman is her second child, who is also enjoying lunch, and to her left is a neighborhood dog that looks on enviously, waiting for the woman to toss him a morsel of food. Such a humble yet lively depiction of mealtime activity, with the portrayal of tender human actions, such as a mother breast-feeding her child in the company of male workers, is unprecedented in eighteenth -century Korean painting. The distinctive theme and style of this album leaf raises questions about its artistic sources. It has been recognized that Kim Hongdo’s work was somewhat influenced by a painting entitled "Lunch,” by Cho Yongsok (1686-1761), a scholar-painter and pioneer of genre imagery, who made sketches of the daily lives of common people in eighteenth-century Chosen society (Fig. 2). However, this painting alone does not account for all of the highly naturalistic elements in Kim Hongdo’s painting, especially the vivid rendering of the figures and their placement in space. These innovations suggest that Kim Hongdo may also have had contact with other kinds of pictorial sources-sources which have hitherto remained unexplored by scholars. Indeed, a careful examination of Kim Hongdo's "Lunch”reveals that aspects found in this work, and several other paintings in the album, may be related to the artist's exposure to new artistic stimuli, including seventeenth-century Chinese Christian woodblock engravings from an important, yet little-known illustrated devotional book. This volume, entitled Jincheng shuxiang (Illustrations from the New Testament for Dedication), was written by a famous German Jesuit priest, Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666 ). The purpose of this paper is to shed some new light on Kim Hongdo's "Lunch,, by examining its distinctive pictorial features in relation to Cho Yongsok’s painting, and the newly discovered foreign source materials. Through this analysis, it should be possible to demonstrate the likelihood that Kim Hongdo's "Lunch” is not merely a simple sketch but a richer, more complex work, reflecting the artist's creative uses of both native and new cross-cultural foreign elements.