The relaxed poses of the two scholars seated in the foreground of this painting echo compositions often attributed to Southern Song painters, while the towering mountains in the background reflect earlier Northern Song traditions. The rounded, overlapping shapes of the mountains, particularly at upper right, and the use of dark dots of ink to articulate the peaks and suggest foliage, help to explain the later addition of a signature attributing the painting to the Yuan master Gao Kegong (1248–1310). However, the use of a greater number of individual brushstrokes to render these dots, as well as those that define the foliage and rocks at lower left, dates this work to the Ming dynasty.