Gothic Cathedral Facade on a Misty Street — Print & Oil Painting

A tree trunk stands between us and the church, and the picture depends on it. It enters at the bottom left, leans slightly right and runs clean off the top edge, broad, dark and unbroken, and it takes up nearly a third of the sheet. The facade is therefore never seen whole. We look at it around an obstacle, which is exactly how it would be seen from this pavement.

The building is neo-Gothic and the drawing knows it: a steep gable carrying a cross, a round rose window, a clock set high in the tower, ranks of pointed arches, buttresses stepping down the flank, and pinnacles along the parapet. All of it is worked in cool grey, stone and pale ochre, with the detail thinning as the wall recedes to the right until the far end is only a suggestion.

One warm passage interrupts that coldness. The double doors at the centre are timber, lit from inside, and the glow reaching out of them spreads across the steps and down onto the wet ground as a long orange reflection. It is the only saturated colour in the architecture, and the eye is sent to it directly.

An orange autumn tree stands to the left of the porch, and its foliage is the second warm event, laid in dry over the grey with the paper showing through the gaps. Between the two, the plaza carries small dark figures: a group beside a bicycle at the left, a lone standing man at the centre in a tan coat, a few more near the doors, and two people crouched on the ground at the very bottom left beside a small pale box.

Fine pale flecks are scattered over the trunk and the upper left of the sheet, throwing a mist across the whole cold half of the picture. A signature and a date sit in the lower right corner. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a rainy street at night reflecting the lights of a colonial building and a grey monochrome view of an old market clock tower.