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Yu Tok-chang [cha Chago; ho Suun]

(b 1694; d 1774). Korean painter. He is considered to be the most important painter of bamboo after Yi Chong (i). The tradition of painting bamboo can be traced back through six generations of the Yu family to Yu Ching-dong (1497–1561). Especially well known was his great-grandfather, Yu Hyog-yon (1616–80), a high-ranking military official, who took Yi Chong’s painting as his model. Tok-chang himself held a sinecure without official duties. Contemporary sources attributed his extraordinary ability in bamboo painting to the long family tradition and stress that the force of the disciplined strokes required never failed him to the end of his life. Although the great scholar–painter and calligrapher Kim Chong-hur complained about his compositions, which he considered lacking in concentration at times, he also praised him. In addition he recorded an anecdote about how some of Tok-chang’s practice sheets were used as packing material for a present sent to China; on arrival this provoked the horror of the Chinese addressee who, immediately realizing the value of the painting on the packing paper, had it mounted.

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  Reproduced by kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Limited, publishers of The Grove Dictionary of Art.
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