Elderly Woman Laughing While Smoking a Cigarette — Print & Oil Painting

Black holds most of this canvas. The ground behind the figure gives nothing at all, no wall, no room, no visible source, and she emerges from it only where white and pale grey have been laid in. The lit passages amount to perhaps a quarter of the surface: a forehead, one cheek, a raised hand, a shoulder, and the smoke.

She is old and the painting says so without softening a thing. Deep furrows run in parallel bands across the brow, the skin at the jaw and throat hangs in long slack folds, the eyes have very nearly vanished into the creases packed around them, and her hair, entirely white, is drawn back tight and gathered into a small knot behind. The modelling is worked in fine graduated tone rather than in visible strokes, so the surface reads as charcoal.

She is laughing, mouth wide, head tipped a little back, and the whole face has folded upward around it. The mechanics of a real laugh have been observed exactly: cheeks pushed up into the eye sockets, chin dropped, throat opened. Between the first and second fingers of her raised hand a cigarette is burning, and the wrist is turned back toward her ear.

From that cigarette a long ribbon of smoke climbs the left side of the picture in loops and coils, given more careful attention than anything except the face itself, and it occupies close to a third of the canvas. At the bottom edge the curved rim of a woven basket appears, its weave rendered in fine radiating lines, the only clue to what she may have been doing before this moment.

The measured saturation sits barely above zero and the value is low, which matches what the eye reports: a grey scale study lit like a stage. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, a long way from an expressive multicolour portrait of a grinning young boy, where the same open delight is handled in precisely the opposite manner.