Four Ao Dai Women Cycling Across a Golden Backdrop — Print & Oil Painting

Four figures cross a golden field and almost nothing except their clothes has been painted. Each woman is a mass of thick white and pale blue laid on with a broad brush and left rough, the ao dai panels swinging out behind in long curved tails. Seen from behind, all four lean into the same direction of travel.

The hats break the scheme. Where this subject usually calls for a white or straw cone, every hat here is a bright orange triangle with a black chin cord looping down the back of the neck, and four of them punched across the width at regular intervals give the picture its beat.

The bicycles are very nearly absent. Each is reduced to three or four dark strokes: a small square grid for a basket, one shallow arc for a wheel, a short stem for the handlebars. No frame is completed and no wheel is closed. The machines are indicated and then abandoned, which keeps the whole visual weight on the white cloth.

Behind and below, the ground is one continuous gold, scrubbed and streaked, with pale vertical bands at the top that could be light or could be reeds, and a wavering pale yellow line threading along the bottom like a path. A few short dark strokes stand about in the field at various depths. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside four women in ao dai cycling through a green bamboo lane and two women in ao dai sharing a bicycle with a basket of violet flowers.