Watercolor of Ben Thanh Market's Clock Tower — Print & Oil Painting

This is transparent watercolour and the paper does most of the lighting. The white of the sheet is left bare through the pale walls, along the top of the parapet and across the open ground at the front, so the brightest passages in the picture are the ones with the least paint on them. Nothing has been made opaque anywhere.

The market front is drawn with real accuracy and then flooded with colour that refuses to stay inside it. The clock tower rises at the centre under a red pitched roof, its round clock face marked in, the words BEN THANH lettered across the wall below, and beneath that a deep arched entrance left almost black. Red tiled roofs run away to either side, and at the right a run of arcade openings is filled with strong blue.

Above the roofs the artist has thrown the pigment. The tree canopy at the upper right is not brushed at all: it is flicked and spattered, dozens of separate droplets of green, violet, ochre and black scattered across wet paper and allowed to bloom into one another. Individual spots run down the sky in fine tails. It is the loosest area of the sheet and it sits directly against the most carefully drawn.

Along the bottom edge the traffic runs as a frieze. Seven or eight motorbikes cross from side to side, each rider given a helmet, a coloured back and almost nothing else, with a pale car among them at the left. They are all set at roughly the same scale on a single line, so they read as a band of movement laid under a stationary building rather than as figures in a space.

The measured brightness is the highest in this group and the saturation among the lowest, which is the natural signature of thin colour on white. Part of our Vietnam collection, near the same market tower seen wider, with a tree and a bank of flowers and a vintage watercolour street scene of a silk merchant and his customer.