Watercolor Street With a Red Tree and Cyclists — Print & Oil Painting

Two trees stand at opposite ends of this street and they have been given opposite conditions. The one at the left is bare: a pale trunk and a spread of thin empty branches reaching over the roofs with nothing on them. The one at the centre right is in full flower, a mass of scarlet and rose blossom carried on dark limbs across the top third of the sheet. Between them the whole street is read as a single season caught at its turn.

The handling is watercolour and gouache, opaque in places and transparent in others, and the buildings show it. Walls are laid in as flat pale washes of cream and grey, roofs as bands of terracotta and warm brown, shutters as small blocks of ochre, and the drawing that holds them together is a fine dark line applied over the top. The perspective steps back in shallow stages without ever settling on one vanishing point.

A ladder leans against the wall at the left, thin and precisely drawn, and it is the sharpest object in the picture. A cyclo waits further back in the middle of the road with its hood up. Terracotta pots and stacked timber fill the right foreground beside a low tiled shed.

The title promises cyclists and the picture gives something quieter. Two young women in ao dai, one white and one coral, stand at the centre of the road with a bicycle held upright between them, and neither is riding. They have stopped in the open, side by side, and a third figure in a conical hat walks away to the right carrying a basket. The bicycle is there as a thing being held rather than used.

Above the roofs the sky is a clean blue with a few strokes of cloud, and the road is left as bare warm paper, which is what makes the red canopy above it read so hot. From our Vietnam collection, near a watercolour of the Ben Thanh market clock tower and an old quarter street set between a green tree and a red one.