Kim Dal-hwang (金達晃), also known by his pen name Songsu-gwan (松水館), was a Korean painter of the late Joseon dynasty active in the late 18th to early 19th century. He worked in the Dongnae region, modern-day Busan, known to have been a center of active production of paintings for export to Japan. The present landscape would have been such a painting and explains the “Chaoxian” [i.e. Korea] in the artist’s inscription, an identity he would not have to have made if his painting were for local consumption.
While he was known for a wide range of subjects—including animals and especially tigers, pines, grape vines and traditional landscapes such as the present where the human presence, suggested by small dwellings nestled by riverbanks and or against mount sides, is subordinate to the forms and rhythms of nature. Here a dramatically contoured peak establishes the painting’s principal axis. Its mass is articulated not through dense modeling but through a succession of elongated curving contours, abbreviated washes, softly modulated ink, and darker accents that suggest fissures and successive geological strata. The middle ground is defined by the wide river and the massive banks. And the foreground by a dramatic cluster of trees with their expressive trunks and branches lording over the domiciles below.
The Japanese would have appreciated the compelling image bringing to mind their own Nanga masters Beisanjin, Goshun, Buncho and others, while eschewing the dotting of the forms common among some artists, and like them, introducing a personal view and approach. In the present painting mountain and forest seem to float between vast sky above and expansive water below, as if existing in a netherworld we can reach only with a stretch of the imagination.
Box end detail:
画九拾号
朝鮮
松水館
山水
？中 蔵
“Painting No.10
Joseon [dynasty]
Songsugwan [sobriquet off Kim Dal-hwang]
‘Landscape’
？naka Collection”