Line of Farmers Harvesting Rice in Diagonal Rows — Print & Oil Painting

The subject is a queue. Twenty five or so people are strung along one continuous line that enters at the upper left and comes down to the lower right, every one of them bent at the waist, and that line is what the picture is really about. Nobody in it works alone and nobody works away from the rest.

The repetition is nearly total and the variation is all in colour. The hats are the same pale cone, the backs are the same curve, the spacing is almost regular, but the tops beneath the hats are blue, green, red, yellow, grey and lavender, and it is the colour rather than the drawing that lets you count the figures.

The line is also a boundary. To one side of it the rice still stands, smooth and pale gold and undisturbed; to the other it has come down into darker broken stubble with heaped bundles lying about. What the picture shows, then, is not a state but an edge, and an edge that has been moving all day.

Four things hold still. A wooden two wheeled cart is heaped high at the upper right, a small thatched hut sits behind it, several bamboo drying frames stand empty at intervals, and a woven basket waits at the lower right corner. Everything else in the canvas is a body at work.

The viewpoint is high and the canvas is tall, so the field tips up toward the viewer and the far end of the line is read as distance rather than as height. The modelling is soft throughout with no stroke visible anywhere, and the measured contrast is low, which suits a picture made almost entirely of one colour. From our Vietnam collection, near a watercolour harvest of farmers bundling golden rice and farmers reduced to conical hats and carrying poles.