Western Collection of Folk Painting from the Late Joseon Period

In the early nineteenth century the licensed stores around Jongno and the Gwangtonggyo Bridge, called sijeon, began to embrace shops selling paintings. The establishment of the art stores owed much to an increased demand of Minhwa or Korean folk painting, along with the rise of the nouveau-riche, in the period. A mid-nineteenth-century lyric “Hanyang-ga” introduces a variety of pictorial subjects while describing folk paintings from the market: the diversification reflects a greater demand and supply as well as burgeoning transactions of Minhwa. Although a large number of folk paintings dating nineteenth century survive today, unfortunately they rarely provide concrete evidence as to what kind of Minhwa the art stores of the period dealt in. In the late nineteenth century a wealth of folk paintings flew into the hands of Western collectors, who visited Joseon for the sake of ethnographic materials. Notable figures include J. B. Bernadou (1858~1908) from the United States who began collecting Minhwa in 1885, Charles Varat (1842~1893) from France who arrived in Joseon in 1888, and Carlo Rossetti (1786~1948), an Italian collector of the early twentieth century. They brought together folk painting as visual materials displaying the local life and customs of the common people. And yet their collections, now in the Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet, Paris or in the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, USA, serve as valuable assets to demonstrate what type of Minhwa the market of late nineteenth Seoul traded in. This essay examines a select of paintings from the Western collections that bear a possibility of cross-checking. First, Magpie and Tiger turns out to have been one of the popular Minhwa as Bernadou and Varat alike purchased, albeit no record as to its trade in the market. The magpie and the tiger are the iconography into which local painters have transformed, and mimicked, what court painters had stylistically established. Likewise, Phoenixes and Birds and Flowers are based on court styles. A group of a rooster, a dog, a lion, and a tiger, which “Hanyang-ga” mentions, is a painting to decorate built-in closets. Chaekgeori, or painting of scholar’s accoutrements, was favored by the upper class, but its mediocre versions sold well in the market. It is remarkable that many paintings in the market imitated, or attempted to emulate, court painting style: they in general copied or reconstructed the refined prototypes by court painters. In other words, the paintings from the market in Seoul show how Minhwa expand its horizon. This paper also looks into formats of Minhwa and their uses. Vertical formats were primarily for the entrance of rooms, and the square paintings of the four animals for either closet doors or the inner side of windows. Tailored at a fixed rate, horizontal formats were in use of adorning the lintel above a room door. Such domestic uses of folk paintings are illustrated in photographs and pictures from the early twentieth century. The photographic images show, more clearly than any other literary sources, how folk paintings were used in the actual living space. The collections of Bernardou and the like-minded make it possible to begin substantial studies on Korean folk painting. They speak to the cultural milieu of Minhwa from the late Joseon period, calling for the need of more systematic examinations on it. Eventually this study will contribute to define anew the historical status of Minhwa, which developed into diverse ways over the nineteenth century, especially through an articulation of the relationship between the court and folk paintings.