Intended to evoke the interior of a Confucian scholar’s study, this screen belongs to a genre known in Korean as chaekkeori (literally, “books and things”), which originated in the late eighteenth century. Initially, such screens were commissioned for the royal court and were painted with trompe-l’oeil bookcases displaying books, imported vessels, and collectibles. In this screen the bookcase has been removed altogether; each panel portrays an assemblage of neatly stacked volumes and other scholarly objects, including paper, ink, a brush, and an ink stone, as well as archaic bronze vessels, porcelain, fruits, flowering plants, and small pieces of furniture. Distinctive objects appearing in the screen include (from right to left) three peacock feathers in a vase (panel 3), monochrome ink landscape paintings (panels 2 and 5), goldpainted black porcelain (panels 4, 7, and 10), a game board (panel 6), and a pendulum clock with both Roman numerals and letters (panel 10). Two auspicious Chinese characters are repeated on vessels throughout the screen, that for longevity (su in Korean; panels 1, 2, 8, and 9) and that for good fortune (bok in Korean; panels 1, 7, 9, and 10).
