Ren Yi, the son of a rice merchant, was trained in a portrait shop. Ren developed a popular richly colored style for figures and for flower-and-bird and landscape paintings, becoming a leading artist in Shanghai by the 1870s, with a large circle of eminent friends and students, such as the literatus Wu Changshi (1844–1927).Cranes, fungus, and pine are emblems of long life, but the artistic ambition of this imposing picture, all angles and fitted parts, goes beyond that of the traditional auspicious birthday picture. The complex pictorial structure, formed by interlocking triangles, seems to draw on the relationship of figure and ground at the heart of seal carving, an art greatly appreciated in the nineteenth century. Ren also may have been inspired by the strong overlapping silhouettes on a shallow ground seen in Japanese art, particularly screens.