Muted Old Corner With Market Stalls and Cyclists — Print & Oil Painting

Grey is the working colour of this canvas and it has been mixed to stay warm. The buildings, the road, the roofs and the sky are all versions of a soft stone tone with cream and umber in it, laid on thickly with a knife, and the picture never once drops to a true black or rises to a clean white. That narrow band is what the word muted in the title is doing, and the measured saturation confirms it.

Two trees are allowed to break the scheme and both are the same temperature. One stands at the left edge in yellow green, the other at the right in gold and ochre, and their canopies run off the top of the canvas so that the street is read between them. There is no red anywhere in this painting, which sets it apart from most of its neighbours.

The corner building is the centrepiece and it is described with real attention: a tiled roof stepping down in two stages, a shallow balcony, dark shuttered openings, and a mass of lilac and violet bougainvillea spilling over its lower storey. Beneath that runs a market awning in strong blue, the one saturated rectangle in the work, and under it the stalls are stacked with pale goods.

The road comes forward from the centre as a wide pale channel, wet and almost bare of paint, and it is the calmest area on the canvas. Everything busy has been kept to its banks: vendors under the awning at the left, a woman in a conical hat crouched beside baskets, a bicycle loaded with violet blooms at the lower left corner.

Traffic thins as it recedes. A cyclist in white comes down the middle distance, two figures with pale umbrellas walk further back, a pair with conical hats stand at the right, and a small group is gathered at the far end where the street dissolves into mist. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, alongside a corner house with bougainvillea and an autumn tree and an old quarter street set between a green tree and a red one.