Vendor at a Golden-Lit Street Corner at Dusk — Print & Oil Painting

This image is a photograph rather than a painted work, and its subject is a single shaft of low sun striking one corner of a street. Everything the light reaches is amber and gold. Everything outside it goes to near black with no detail recovered at all, so the frame is divided into a lit wedge and a void, and the two meet along hard diagonal edges cast by the buildings themselves.

The corner pillar holds the centre. It is rendered plaster, cracked and stained, with a fluted pilaster running up its face, and near the top two enamel plates are fixed at right angles to one another. One reads DUONG NGUYEN THAI HOC, the other DUONG LE LOI. Above them a painted panel carries two large characters. To either side run tall wooden shutter boards, silvered with age, each plank separated by a dark seam.

A woman stands at the right in a conical hat and a loose pale tunic, holding a wide shallow basket at waist height in both hands. The basket carries fish, pale and silver, with two or three red items among them. A carrying pole rests against her side. Her face is turned down toward the load and shaded by the brim, and the light catches only her forearms, one cheek and the crown of the hat.

Her shadow is the reason the picture works. It falls on the pale wall to her left at almost full height, and at that scale the silhouette is unmistakable: the wide cone of the hat, the sloped shoulders, the fall of the tunic to the knee. The photograph therefore shows the same figure twice, once in warm detail and once as a flat black sign, standing side by side on the same wall.

Below, the pavement runs off to the lower right as a pale band, and a low step separates it from the road. The measured value is the lowest in this group while the saturation stays high, which is exactly what a small area of hot light inside a dark frame produces. From our Vietnam collection, near a golden toned alley with two cyclists under hazy light and a lantern lined street in Hoi An with a basket vendor.