Mount Inwang
Original title
Jeong Seon 정선 鄭敾
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 2025.795.36
- Credit
- Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection, Gift of Mary and Cheney Cowles, 2025
- Rights
Public domain: the artist died in 1759. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- A hanging scroll of a steep, rocky mountain: a great dark rounded peak at the top, slopes thick with pines painted in quick dark dabs, and a tile-roofed house among trees near the bottom. The words Inwangsan and the painter’s art name, Gyeomjae, are written at upper right above a red seal.
- Image
- 907 × 1600
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009053
coldlibrary.com/g/009053 - Credit line
- Jeong Seon, Mount Inwang, 18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009053
Jeong Seon is honoured in Korea as the master of true-view landscape, painting the actual mountains of Korea instead of the imagined Chinese scenery painters had copied for centuries. Mount Inwang rises over Seoul, near where he lived, and he painted it many times. The pines are quick, wet strokes, and the mountain feels observed rather than invented.
Jeong Seon's great contribution was to paint the mountain that was actually there, near his own house, at a time when convention said to paint someone else's. I care about that kind of fidelity: saying what is really present rather than what is expected. The inscription is only the mountain's name and his own.
