Each sheet of this album bears the painter's seal Chongjie. The first four sheets are of high quality, especially in the depiction of figures; the four others, whose seals have a gap in the upper left corner of the frame, are clearly less convincing in execution and are later additions by another hand.
Wang Chongjie was a well-known painter of landscapes and figures in Peking. At the advanced age of over sixty, he is said to have become court painter at the Imperial Painting Academy (Huayuan). In his early years he was good friends with the figure painter Cui Zizhong (active ca. 1600–1644) whose style of grotesque archaism he soon adopted. The exaggerated crumbled mode of the depiction of the cloths, the gnarled tree trunks and the almost surreal looking terrain plateaus on which the scholars sit or walk show exactly the style of this famous late Ming master. And yet the delicacy of execution, the tasteful composition of the sheets and the transfigured faces of those portrayed possess the aura of literary painting. This unusual album is certainly a jewel in the Frankfurt collection.