An early ancestor portrait of an official 17th Century

hanging scroll, color on silk, the portrait shows an elderly scholar wearing the traditional blue informal robe bianfu with pale grey trimming designated for scholars, over a pale grey robe with white cloud motifs, the hat the square jin popularly worn by Ming scholars, sitting in a lacquered horseshoeback chair draped with brocade, in front of a table laden with scholars' objects, framed

Compare another late Ming portrait of a scholar in ink and color on paper illustrated by Simon Kwan, Chinese Portraits, 2003, no. 17, attributed to the Jiangnan School of portraiture 'where applications of color wash have mainly been used to delineate the facial features'.