Wide Lotus Lake Beneath a Golden Horizon — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is split across its width and the two halves are handled as opposites. The upper third is open water and sky, smooth, pale and very nearly empty. The lower two thirds are a lily bed built from thousands of separate touches. One half is rest and the other is incident, and the line between them is the edge of the pads rather than the edge of the land.

A broad band of pale yellow gold lies along the far shore and repeats at once on the still water below it, so the brightest passage in the picture is a horizontal bar laid across the upper third. Above that the sky cools quickly to a soft blue, and no sun is shown anywhere.

The lily bed is painted pad by pad in green, olive, turquoise, yellow green and dark blue green. The discs are largest and most widely spaced at the back of the bed and pack tighter and darker as they come forward, until the bottom edge is almost black. Density is doing the work that perspective would normally do.

Small pink and lilac blossoms sit among the pads, scattered rather than grouped and never large enough to take the picture over. Thin grass blades rise through the bed at intervals and are the only vertical lines in a work otherwise made entirely of flat overlapping ovals.

A clump of pale reeds stands in the water at the left, a low flat shoreline runs along the back, and white birds are gathered on the far bank at the right with two or three more in the air. Saturation measures moderate against a low value, the reading of a dark green bed beneath a small bright sky. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a close view of a pink lotus with small fish below and two women in ao dai among pink lotus blossoms in the rain.