A body of formal features including deep mountains, a remote house pushed to a side of the picture plane, and a grove of dense trees has been believed to constitute the hard-and- fast iconography of “Dwelling in Reclusion,” the pictorial theme popular in Korea in the form of an ideal landscape painting. The image of reclusion has its own history, however. In fact, literati’s preference for an ideal hermitage has gradually shifted from mountains and forests toward walled cities over the course of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1897). Eighteenth century Joseon, in particular, saw the rise of landscape paintings that depict not only the surrounding views but also the interiors of a house and garden in detail. The change is part of a cultural phenomenon of the period that special interest was paid to building a study and a garden where the appreciation of painting, calligraphy and antiques would take place, and it comes with, as if ref lecting the idyllic life-style, the inclusion of pictorial motifs such as antique objects and scholars’ accoutrements that little attention was given until the middle of the Joseon period. It was in this context that Long Days in the Quiet Mountains - the subject ✽ Korea University, Department of Archaeology and Art History representative of what I term “landscape of reclusion after a poem” - enjoyed great popularity in the late Joseon period. Long Days in the Quiet Mountains derives from a thirteen-century ode of the same title composed by Luo Dajing (1196-1242), a scholar and poet of the Southern Song period (1127- 1279). Since the prominent Korean statesman and scholar Heo Gyun (1569-1618) called for a renewed attention to the text and its pictorial potentials, the Long Days has gone through development and modification in Korea: it was first made known as an example depicting a friend’s visit when the Chinese album titled Qiangu zuisheng (The Most Splendid through the Ages) was introduced to Joseon; decades later, Jeong Seon (1676-1759), the most celebrated Korean painter of the time, focused on a particular passage from the text by Luo to illustrate; painters of subsequent generations including Shim Sa-jeong (1707-1769) and Kim Hee-seong (d. after 1763) began to divide the subject into six or eight scenes; and multiple works by Yi Yin-mun (1745-after 1824), Oh Soon (dates unknown), and Yi Jae-gwan (1783-1838) suggest the last phase where the subject was conventionalized into a painting for eight-panel folding screens. While the establishment of the eight-scene format might have been indebted to the earlier Chinese prototype, it is equally notable that later Korean versions show a tendency to integrate the subject of Chinese origin into aesthetics indigenous to Joseon scholar-recluses. Until the end of the Joseon period Long Days in the Quiet Mountains continued to follow the format of the eight-scroll set, each scroll using motifs pertinent to a sub-theme - taking a nap, drinking tea, reading books, strolling, and writing. These activities represent diverse aspects of the life a withdrawn scholar would lead in nature, which I categorize largely into two groups, indoor and outdoor, for the sake of a productive analysis. Long Days in the Quiet Mountains borrows the composition from paintings of the theme of “visiting friends” or takes advantage of pictorial idioms such as the remote house, both of which have long been employed for the subject of reclusion. It thus appears that painters have drawn on the images of reclusion to represent the hermit’s life described in the Long Days text, resulting in iconography typical of the Long Days painting. And yet each image underwent a change in its signification: the hermitage in deep mountains and its related motifs, which have once stood for a lofty, disinterested and spiritual realm, now represent an idealized site for reclusion in the mundane world. The significance of the Long Days lies therefore in the fact that it encapsulates the images of reclusion current in the late Joseon period, combining various motifs to represent ideal sites for reclusion.