The artist’s inscription at upper right states that this painting is one of five hundred representations of pomegranates that Qian Zai painted when he was eighty years old. While the branches of the bush do not indicate a particular season, all of the flowers are in bloom, which suggests summer as well as the passage of time, because pomegranates take four to six months to bear fruit. Qian Zai’s fascination with the pomegranate theme in his later years may relate to their symbolism in Chinese visual culture: the character for pomegranate (zi) is a homonym of the character for son, and thus images of this fruit convey the desire for progeny and, by extension, longevity.