Among the extant portrait texts by artists of Ming-Qing China, the most eye-catching are those in which the main character has one or more beauties in attendance. Two modes of this type of work were particularly popular: "three good things" and "the gentleman and the beauties." The former is a representation of the happiness of life. The idea was derived from the anecdotes of Xiao Chen of the Southern dynasties: the painter would place three elegant objects, namely a book, a bottle of wine, and a beautiful singing girl beside the main character in the portrait. The second mode, "the gentleman and the beauty," is a romantic scene in which the main character is situated in the center of the picture, with one or more beauties beside him. These two modes have a reciprocal relationship with the common effect of outlining a picture of the intellectuals' life of leisure rather than their general values, such as deeds and ethics. In a Ming-Qing Dynasty portrait of "the three good things" or "the gentleman and the beauty," the main character is customarily placed at the center point, and on that basis the painter constructs a scene that is enhanced by the elements of objects and beauty. The poet (who would inscribe some verse beside the portrait) is guided to express direct thoughts and conduct conversations: those substantial objects would lead one to extended symbolic meanings according to their shapes, textures, colors and functions. The effect of the beauties beside the main character is an erotic atmosphere and visual experience, which depicts the leisurely life of the literati. Focusing on the portrait texts of these two modes, the present essay examines how the artists collaborated in using the "objects" and the "beauty" in a metaphorical sense, and, through a comprehensive survey of a variety of inscriptions, argues that these portrait templates are rhetoric products of the creators' intertextuality and language structures. It discusses how the collaborating creators of the artwork play with the interrelation and deduction of the two ends of "object" and "beauty" via the symbolic relations and metaphorical thoughts in their creation of an image of an intellectual who is deemed to have an elegant appreciation of objects and beauties, which represents the vogue of the time