Few paintings by the artist Zhu Zhao (active second half of the 18th century) have survived today. Another work, an album of landscapes, is known in the collection of Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts in Japan. Zhu Zhao was a native of Jinan, the capital of Shandong province and well-known for his poetry and landscape painting in his time.

This painting, executed predominantly in ink on paper with touches of light green in the trees and crimson colours on roof-tops, depicts a peaceful water-side village scene on an early spring day. The lower half of the composition features two waterside trees just beginning to sprout new shoots. A cluster of cottage houses and a wooden bridge near the trees lead the viewer to look into the far side of the water, and then up to appreciate the billowing mists and the mountains. The artist's poetic inscription shows that this landscape is inspired by a famous local site of his hometown, the countryside on the Jingguang Lake in the area of Mt. Huabuzhu. Furthermore, both the depiction of the mountain and indeed the very subject matter of water village furthermore reminds of the great 14th-century literati-artist Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) and his celebrated handscrolls Autumn Colours at Mt. Que and Mt. Hua (1295, National Palace Museum, Taipei) and Water Village (1302, Palace Museum, Beijing), although there is little stylistic affinity between

The ends of the bottom roller are in line with the edges of the side borders of the scroll, which suggests that the scroll, in its current mounting format, may have been designed to be hung together with some other scrolls as a series.