Gathering among the Members of Office Censor-General (1700s): Art, History and Details

Gathering among the Members of Office Censor-General (1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In the early Joseon period, paintings of scholar-officials’ gatherings (gyehoedo) gained popularity among the Korean elite. This painting was commissioned by Sim Eongwang, an official of the Joseon court, to depict a miwon gyehoedo, a gathering of cabinet members (saganwon). This meeting is assumed to have been ordered around the time when Sim was the head of the saganwon in 1530. At the bottom of the painting, he added his poem to express a "literati respect for high spirituality," as stated in the first line. The poem was later recorded in his anthology titled Eochonjip (Book of Fisher Village). This painting itself, however, is an 18th-century copy of the original 16th-century painting.

Object facts

• Title: Gathering among the Members of Office Censor-General
• Date: 1700s
• Culture: Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll with calligraphy; ink and light colors on paper
• Dimensions: Painting only: 39.4 x 56.5 cm (15 1/2 x 22 1/4 in.); Overall: 122.6 x 68.5 cm (48 1/4 x 26 15/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Korean Art
• Accession number: 1997.147

A detail from the museum

The gathering portrayed in this painting took place in the 16th century, but the painting itself is a later copy, possibly of the 18th century.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Major African Sculpture, Recent Mark Tansey Painting, and Other Works of Art Enter CMA Collection,” September 16, 1997, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Yun, Jin-young. “Gathering Paintings in the Context of Bureaucratic Society of the Joseon Dynasty [조선시대 관료사회의 新參禮와 契會圖].” Yeoksa minsokhak (2004): 135–164.
• Seon, Seung-hye. The Lure of Painted Poetry: Japanese and Korean Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.