Nahan (Chinese, Luohan) Standing in a Landscape Viewing an Ink-Painted Scroll Depicting a Seated Bodhisattva While Assisted by an Elderly Male Attendant

This painting is mounted and framed as a discrete album leaf. Done in ink and colors on paper, the painting, which might originally have been mounted as a hanging scroll, presumably came from a larger set of multiples, each representing an arhat (Korean: nahan; Chinese: luohan) -- saintly, enlightened beings who protect the Buddhist faith. This painting depicts an arhat clad in a pink monk’s robe, embellished with a red sash and a green cape, standing at the left edge of the composition beside a tall blue-and-green rock and beneath an old, gnarled tree branch with red and green foliage. A halo encircles the arhat's head. Dressed in a russet robe and wearing a black hat with long ribbons trailing at the back, an attendant stands at the right edge of the composition. The attendant holds the upper edge of a hanging scroll, which the arhat is unrolling. The scroll, which represents an ink painting and which is mounted in red and black, represents a bodhisattva seated on a rock. A green rock occupies the lower left corner of the composition; the even-toned green ground that traverses the foreground fades away in the middle and backgrounds to suggest distant space.