A gentleman sits at leisure beneath towering pines. Standing at attention behind his right shoulder is a servant with a long carrying pole. At the gentleman’s side sits a woven basket full of chrysanthemums of yellow, orange, and pink hue that have been freshly plucked from the abundant plants that dot the landscape around them. Bounding the rear ground of the picture is a river, which cascades back and forth as it flows downward toward the viewer and out of the side of the pictorial frame.Hua Guan was a leading portrait painter from Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, who lived and worked in Beijing for most of his career. His portraits often depict their subjects engaging in elegant leisure pursuits—boating on rivers, cultivating flowers, composing poetry. Such portraits were not made for ritual veneration in the family’s ancestral hall, but rather to be enjoyed during the sitter’s own lifetime as expressions of cultural values and aspirations. The sitter in this portrait is playing a sophisticated game of historical dress-up, inhabiting the role of the celebrated poet-recluse Tao Yuanming (365–427), whose love of chrysanthemums made the flower synonymous with the qualities for which Tao was most admired: love of the simple country life, rejection of the petty concerns of officialdom, and insistence on following one’s heart. By combining a striking likeness with a Tao Yuanming-inspired set piece, painter and patron created a powerful visual document of the sitter’s aspirations. The sitter in this painting is not mentioned in the inscription, so his identity remains a mystery, but further research may reveal who he was.