The Greeting

Four elegantly dressed men and women, plus a brown and white dog, gather around a rug-covered table in a shadowy room in this vertical painting. The people all have pale skin and are lit from our left. The women have blond hair and wear long silk dresses, and the men have shoulder-length wavy hair. At the center of the painting and closest to us, a woman stands with her back mostly to us, her body angled away to our right. Her face is in shadow, but we see the tip of a delicate nose. Her hair is pulled to the back of her head, and a few touches of white paint suggest a ribbon or ornament there. She wears pearl earrings, a pearl necklace, and a four-stranded pearl bracelet on the hand we can see. Her pale, mint-green dress drops off her shoulders and has a tight bodice. Puffy white sleeves of her undershirt are gathered at her elbows under the short, bell-shaped sleeves of the bodice. Her skirt falls in shiny folds and pools on the floor. The fabric reflects cream white where the light strikes the satin, and the shadows are cool, faint green. The woman holds her right hand out and clasps the hand of a cleanshaven man on the right side of the table. He smiles as he looks at her with wide-set eyes in a round face. He wears a broad-brimmed hat. His brown jacket is tied with a red bow at his throat and is red where the cuffs are rolled back. The white shirt he wears beneath is visible at his neck and in voluminous sleeves at his wrists. The jacket is lined with shiny buttons down the front, and it opens across his hips over red pants. He holds a glass with amber-colored liquid up in front of his chest with his other hand. A man between the pair is deep in shadow in the background. He holds up one hand as he looks down and to our left, a faint smile on his lips. The fourth person, another woman, sits to our left on our side of the table. Her hair is gathered in bunches over each ear. She also wears pearl earrings and a necklace. Her dress is red over an ice-blue skirt, which has bands of gold down the front and around the bottom hem. She holds both hands up near the table, to our right, as she looks down at the dog in the lower left corner of the composition. The dog has brown and white spots, a feathery tail, long brown ears, a white muzzle, and it stands tensed, its head lowered a little as it looks up toward the table. The rug covering the table is patterned with crimson red, black, and tan. A silver dish holds an orange-colored piece of fruit at the front right corner of the table. A landscape painting hanging on the back wall behind the group is framed in architectural molding. Details are difficult to make out in the shadowy background but there seems to be an olive-green screen behind the seated woman, with a piece of cloth, perhaps a coat, flung over the top. The floor is tiled with brown and white squares. The artist signed the work as if a coat-of-arms over the landscape painting is painted partially with his name: “P HOO.”