Sin Saimdang was a renowned painter of Korea during its last feudal dynasty.

From a child she studied hard and was good at composition writing, embroidery, needlework, etc.

Above all, she was a painter of exceptional caliber. As a child she painted landscapes and grapes well after the model of An Kyon’s paintings to one’s admiration. She painted birds, fishes, flowers, grass, butterflies, bees, grasshoppers and all others from nature.

In those days women were too severely discriminated against to be left to go out their houses as they liked. She had no alternative but to procure materials for her paintings in the courtyard and back yard of her house alone. However, she closely observed and truthfully painted those things and phenomena nobody else was interested in. This made up an individual style of her painting.

Her typical examples were paintings of mandarin fish, eggplants, grapes and so on.

The “Autumn Grass” painted by her was widely known not only to the then painting circles but also to the Royal Court. It was used at the Court as an original design for embroidery and pottery. Her painting “Mandarin Fish” is of great value because it bears the handwriting of her son named Ri I.

She painted two eggplants full of very soft oval fruits. The full-blown flowers of a pink are found near the eggplants while there are bees flying into the flowers. Grasshoppers are seen to creep below the eggplants. Their fruits are so light-colored as to be glossy and soft to the eye. After all, they all look lively and truthful.

In the final analysis, she closely watched everything with deep interest, discovered their beauty readily and reproduced it in her paintings with individuality and femininity.

She was skilled in painting grass and insects. When she put her paintings of insects on the yard of her house to expose them to the sun her chickens mistook them for real ones and pecked at them. Indeed, she was so unusually a skilful painter as Sol Ko who painted a pine tree on the wall of the Hwangryong Temple like a natural one to mislead birds about its lifelike reality and cause them to bump against the wall in a bid to perch on the branches of the tree.

She not only widened the sphere of her pictorial art but also made clear graphic paintings in colors to counter the black-and-white ones which reflected the tastes of the feudal rulers, thereby contributing to developing realistic Korean paintings in our country.

Besides, she attained wide fame for teaching her children well. She composed many poems to sing of our natural beauty and laud women for their fidelity.

It was really the great pride of Korea that a talented lady painter and poet like her was produced in our country although feudal ethics were stubbornly imposed on its women in those years.

Rim Song I