Ao Dai Woman Among Autumn Lotus Leaves and a Dragonfly — Print & Oil Painting

The lotus here has gone over, and that is what the painting is about. Broad leaves fill the whole field around the figure in russet, khaki, burnt orange, olive and grey brown, many curled inward at the rim, dried and buckled, carried on long speckled stems. Two pink blossoms survive, one at the upper left and one over at the right, and a seed head has already turned brown.

Against that spent palette the woman is painted almost entirely in pale lilac, white and cool grey. Her ao dai catches faint pink and blue wherever the light turns, her conical hat is a soft powder blue, and the contrast between her coolness and the warm decay around her is the reason she reads as clearly as she does at that scale.

She has raised a hand to the brim of her hat and turned slightly, eyes closed, mouth calm, her long black hair falling forward across the shoulder. A flat black case hangs at her hip on a strap, dark and rectangular and quite modern, and it is the one object in the picture that belongs to an ordinary working day.

Two small events occupy the upper right. A dragonfly, pale blue and nearly transparent, hovers against a patch of bright acid green, and beneath it the background lightens into that same green while the left side stays grey brown. A few pink petals drift across the middle of the canvas at differing sizes. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, alongside a woman in sage ao dai combing her hair by a lotus pond and a close view of a pink lotus with small fish below.