This is a full length studio portrait of a Peranakan man in a suit holding white gloves in his left hand. It was very common for Peranakans in the Dutch East Indies and the Straits Settlements to depict themselves in Western outfits like this as a means of visually identifying with the colonial elite whom they worked closely with. For Chinese Peranakans, ancestral portraits do not just seek to commemorate a death but serves the function of extending the presence of the deceased beyond death.
