High cliffs loom over a riverside house that looks out over a wide expanse of river, with distant hills forming the far bank. A single figure appears in a boat, perhaps heading for the house where another figure waits, both likely enjoying wafts of summer’s warmth seeping into the early autumn air.
Wang Gai is not recorded in standard biographical texts but the style here suggests a dating in the latter part of the 17th century. He would thus have been too young to be included in the Tuhui baojian of around 1680 and too old to have been noted by Zhang Geng writing his Guochao huazheng lu in 1735. Some elements of this fan painting relate to the style of Gong Xian (1619-89), a major painter active in Nanjing at this time.