Watercolor Sketch of a Woman in a Flowing Teal Gown — Print & Oil Painting

Most of this tall sheet has been left alone. The paper stays bare across the top, down the right side and along the bottom edge, and every mark in the picture is crowded onto a diagonal running from the head at the upper right to a mass of loose wash in the lower left. The white is not a background here, it is simply where the artist stopped.

The figure is turned three quarters away from us. Bare shoulders and back, a fitted bodice flecked with teal and pale green, the hair swept up and pinned with a violet stroke at the crown while one strand escapes at the nape. Her face is given in profile by about a dozen marks: the line of the brow and nose, a soft grey in the eye socket, a small warm touch at the mouth. It is the most resolved passage in the picture and it is still only a sketch.

From the hip down the dress abandons drawing altogether. Turquoise, sap green, slate and ink spread into a wide sweeping mass that fills the lower left corner, blotted in some places, dragged dry in others, with a fine spray of dark flecks thrown across it. One long black stroke runs from the waist to the hem and hooks sideways at the bottom, and it is the only mark in the skirt that behaves like a line.

Beneath all that a broad charcoal circle has been drawn, open at the top, curving from the lower left round to the centre. Nothing is attached to it and it describes no object. What it does is gather the loose washes into one contained shape and keep the picture from running off the bottom of the sheet.

The measurement reports very low saturation against a very high overall brightness, which is exactly the profile of bare paper carrying a small quantity of pigment. Nothing in the image names a place or a period. From our Vietnam collection, near a contour line drawing of overlapping ao dai figures on raw canvas and three women in pink and red with their dresses streaming behind them.