A teacher of Confucian ethics, the Chinese philosophical system focused on social harmony and familial responsibility, Gion Nankai was also a painter. Ike Taiga (池大雅) (1723–1776) was among his students. Nankai inscribed this landscape with one of 24 poems for painting subjects composed by the scholar and painter Tang Yin (唐寅) (Chinese, 1470–1524). It reads as follows:
The mountain pavilion is desolate, visitors are rare.
Mud patches the brushwood gate; leaves patch my clothes.
Rising not from the bamboo bed, my head like snow.
Already without intent, I abandon questions of Zen.
