Kim Ŭng-wŏn was a painter who followed the pictorial manner of the Hŭngsŏn Taewŏn-gun Yi Ha-ŭng (李昰應). His sobriquet was Soho (小湖); he worked primarily in the painting of orchids and is said to have practiced clerical and running-script calligraphy. Together with Cho Sŏk-jin, An Jung-sik, and Kang P'il-ju, he served as one of the instructors at the Calligraphy and Painting Fine Arts Association Training Institute in the 1910s.

His paired hanging scrolls of Rock and Orchid create the impression of a single unified composition: when the two panels are placed together, the rock and the orchid appear to extend outward from the center of the combined picture surface. This format — in which a fantastically shaped scholar's rock is positioned at one edge of the composition — was inherited from the manner of Yi Ha-ŭng and became the defining compositional formula of Kim Ŭng-wŏn's orchid paintings.

The work is accompanied by a text by O Se-chang (吳世昌) and is identified therein as having been produced in the kapjin year, corresponding to 1904. Among his paintings of Korean native orchids (kugnando), this work displays an exceptionally elevated quality of refinement. His Orchid painting is a work of distinctive character in which color is applied: slender, sharply rendered green orchid leaves extend horizontally across the picture surface. The inscription reads: "Graceful and secluded, the orchid is planted by the stone steps; its purple stems and green leaves open toward the spring. (奕奕幽蘭傍砌栽 紫莖綠葉向春開)"