Sunlit Street Corner Under a Vivid Autumn Tree — Print & Oil Painting

The light comes through the leaves rather than around them, and the pavement is where you see it. The whole lower right of this canvas is broken into patches of cream, gold and shadow, laid down in short flat strokes at every angle, so the ground reads as dappled without a single leaf shadow being drawn. It is the most carefully worked passage in the picture and it contains no object whatsoever.

Above it the canopy fills the top two thirds in vermilion, orange and chrome yellow, with a paler yellow green tree behind it at the left and a few patches of blue sky surviving at the upper corners. The blossom is built from separate blunt dabs standing proud of the surface, and the branches supporting them are drawn in dark line over the top of the colour.

One cool geometry cuts across all this warmth. A run of shop awnings crosses the middle of the canvas striped in white and pale blue, their edges ruled straight and their scalloped hems repeating at a regular interval. Against a picture otherwise made of dabs and dapples, that band of hard stripes is the only ruled drawing present, and it holds the composition together across its full width.

A pale trunk rises at the right, thick and streaked with white, and it is the one continuous vertical. Behind it the shopfronts recede in ochre and grey, hung with red tiled roofs and small dark openings.

The people are set along the shaded edge. A cyclo waits at the lower left with its driver in blue and its hood loaded with orange blooms, a woman in white ao dai and yellow trousers stands at the centre beside a bicycle, and further figures in conical hats work at stalls beneath the awnings with one in red away at the right. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near an old street pavement reflecting a golden autumn tree and a golden tree standing over an old street market stall.