Corner House With Bougainvillea and an Autumn Tree — Print & Oil Painting

The house stands on a corner and the painting has been built to show both of its faces at once. Its gable end comes toward us at the centre left, its long flank runs back to the right, and the meeting of the two is placed almost exactly on the middle of a canvas twice as wide as it is tall. Everything else in the picture is arranged along the two roads that leave that corner.

Three separate masses of flower surround it and none of them shares a colour. A yellow flowering shrub crowds the far left edge. Magenta and crimson bougainvillea pours over the awning at the centre. A great gold and orange canopy fills the entire right third on a slim pale trunk. Read left to right the picture moves from lemon through hot pink to burnt orange, and the house sits in the middle of that sequence in plain ochre.

Everything has been laid on with the knife and nothing has been drawn. The red roof tiles are short parallel drags of terracotta, the brickwork under the eaves is a row of blunt dabs, the shutters are single blocks of dark blue, and the walls carry the ridges left standing by the blade. The distant buildings to the right are scraped in so thinly that the ground shows through them.

The road is a carpet. Fallen gold and orange leaves cover it from the lower left corner to the far right, thickest under the tree and thinning as they approach the house, with paler scumbling worked over them where the light falls. Nothing in the lower half of the canvas is grey.

Four groups occupy that ground: a woman in white on a bicycle at the lower left under a conical hat, a bicycle heaped with orange blossom at the centre with its vendor beside it, a cyclo under a pale red hood carrying a passenger to the right of that, and a second cyclo further off. The measured saturation is among the highest here, which the canopy and the leaf litter together explain. From our Vietnam collection, near a sunlit street corner under a vivid autumn tree and an old street plaza beneath a purple flowering tree.