About the Cover

details: Attributed to Sin Saimdang, Plants and Insects, Chosŏn dynasty. Album leaf, ink and color on silk, H. 27.4 cm × W. 20.9 cm. Harvard Art Museums/ Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Louise Haskell Daly Fund and Ernest B. and Helen Pratt Dane Fund for the Acquisition of Oriental Art, 1994.92. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Sin Saimdang 申師任堂 (1504–1551), a Korean painter, poet, and calligrapher, most likely painted Plants and Insects (Ch'och'ungdo 草蟲圖) on this issue's cover. She may have benefited from being born into a family with five girls and no boys, for her father gave her an unusually thorough education for a girl and encouraged her talents, even to the point of choosing for her a husband who promised to allow her to pursue her painting and other artistic endeavors. Although her art is rightly celebrated, she is best known in Korea today as the mother of Yi I 李珥 (1536–1584), Chosŏn's most prominent neo-Confucian scholar.

The quintessential "wise mother" (ŏjin ŏmŏni 어진 어머니), Saimdang is often held up as a paragon of traditional Confucian—hence, Korean—motherhood. Although this image is mostly a modern construct, she anticipated it herself by choosing the sobriquet Saim 師任, which recalls Tai Ren 太任, the mother of King Wen 文王 and grandmother of the Duke of Zhou. Koreans today remember Tai Ren as an early practitioner of rigorous "prenatal education" (K. t'aegyo 胎教), which posits a link between an expectant mother's virtuous thoughts, moods, and actions and the moral character of her unborn child.

Sin Saimdang is literally the most visible Chosŏn woman in Korea today: her likeness is on the 50,000 won banknote. The Bank of Korea elided the question of whether she should best be remembered as an exemplary mother or a great artist by putting detail from another of her paintings of plants and insects on the reverse of the 5,000-won note, which features a portrait of her son on the front. HJAS thanks the Harvard Art Museums for their kind permission to reproduce the image.

DLH