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A pair of Korean paintings 19th century image 1
A pair of Korean paintings 19th century image 2
A pair of Korean paintings 19th century image 3
A pair of Korean paintings 19th century image 4
Property from a Private English Estate 私人英國遺產藏品
Lot 331

A pair of Korean paintings
19th century

8 November 2012, 10:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £3,500 inc. premium

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A pair of Korean paintings

19th century
Ink and colour on silk, one depicting three friends at a drinking party, including an elderly gentleman playing the qin and another with a fan, the group surrounding a stem cup, ear-cup and other accoutrements for a feast, all under a willow beside a flowing river with a fisherman beneath a pagoda built out onto the water and three small sail boats in the distance beneath calligraphy; the other with a boatman punting a seated gentleman along a river beside a tiered pagoda with an arched bridge in the foreground and one wooded and one bare mountain peak in the distance beneath calligraphy, both framed and glazed. Each 81.3cm (32in) high x 35cm (13¾in) wide (2).

Footnotes

Provenance: acquired in Korea by Patrick O'Donovan, who was a war correspondent for The Observer newspaper in Korea in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and thence by descent

十九世紀 人物圖一對(韓國) 設色絹本 鏡框

來源:由已故藏家的叔叔於韓國所得;已故藏家的叔叔是The Observer報紙一名於二十世紀四十及五十年代早期駐韓國的戰地記者

On the painting of a gathering of three friends, there is an inscription in Classical Chinese:

出步溪邊
邂逅野友
山翁向農
麻說粳稻

which may be translated as:

Out for a walk beside the stream
I meet by chance rustic friends
old mountain man faced to the peasant
talking coarsely of rice


On the other painting is a line borrowed from a poem by the famous Song dynasty literatus Su Dongpo (1037-1101), it reads:

江山清空我塵土

which may be translated as:

mountains and streams pure and empty, and I so dusty!

Additional information

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