Two elegantly adorned women wearing white face powder and other cosmetics prepare for a literary gathering on a veranda. Their elegant hands arrange the incense, books, and paintings that were requisite to scholarly events. The full plantain leaves and other vegetation behind the stone fence suggest summer, an ideal season for such outdoor festivities. An almost identical scene fills the right side of a larger painting of scholars in a garden by Du Jin, who was active at the Ming court in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and was noted for his renderings of flowers and his scholarly activities; the painting shown here is attributed to him because of this similarity.