Basket Boats on a Canal Through Golden Fields — Print & Oil Painting

The field has been ploughed into lines and the lines do all the perspective. Long parallel furrows of ripe rice run from the bottom corners toward the horizon, tightening as they go, laid in with thick knife strokes of chrome yellow, ochre and orange over a darker underlayer. There is no drawn vanishing point anywhere, only the convergence of those rows.

Down the middle of them runs a narrow dark canal, and on it sit six round basket boats. They are the only circles in a picture made entirely of straight lines, and the artist has kept them slate blue and grey so that they read as holes cut in the gold. Four are heaped with cut greenery and yellow bundles.

The workers are small and unhurried. A figure in orange stands on the left bank, one in red bends over a boat, one in blue crouches in the nearest coracle at the lower centre, and two more conical hats show above the crop out at the right, no bigger than fingernails. Those hats are the only pure white in the canvas.

A single small hut stands at the point where the canal narrows, raised on green posts under a golden roof with open sides. It is the one piece of architecture and the one right angle in the work, and because everything else recedes past it, it fixes the middle distance.

Above, the picture simply stops. A pale cream sky occupies the top fifth with a thin white band at the horizon and no cloud, no sun and no incident of any kind, so the whole weight of the image sits in its lower four fifths. Saturation measures moderate against high brightness, which the yellow ground accounts for. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside an overhead view of basket boats on a winding green canal and farmers harvesting flat diagonal rows of chrome yellow rice.