Lantern-Lined Street in Hoi An with a Basket Vendor — Print & Oil Painting

Not one of these lanterns is lit. The street carries dozens of them, hung from the branches of a slim tree at the centre left and strung along a wire that crosses to the buildings on the right, and each is painted as a flat disc of colour with no glow inside it and no light thrown onto anything below. This is a lantern picture made in broad daylight, and the lanterns are treated as objects rather than as sources.

The tree is doing the work a cable normally does. Its trunk rises from a square opening cut in the pavement at the lower left, and its thin branches spread right across the upper half of the sheet, each carrying two or three lanterns in scarlet, orange, violet, rose and blue at different heights. Because the branches are irregular the lanterns hang in no pattern at all, which is the exact opposite of the tidy line strung along the wire further down the street.

The two sides of the street have been given opposite temperatures. The left is warm: an ochre and yellow wall running back in perspective, blue shutters, a striped awning, a row of potted plants along the kerb. The right is cool: a two storey front in teal and slate with a first floor balcony, a green panelled door, and a narrow red banner hanging down beside it.

One person is on the street. A vendor in a violet top and a conical hat walks away from us down the middle of the road, a shoulder pole across the back of the neck with a covered basket swinging at either end, and the figure has been set small, centred, at the precise point where the two rows of buildings converge. The medium is transparent watercolour and the roadway around her is largely bare paper, which is why she reads as walking into light. From our Vietnam collection, beside the same town at night with its lanterns burning over the river and ochre Hoi An walls photographed behind a woman in white ao dai.