Golden Tree Over an Old Street Market Stall — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is divided down the middle by what is overhead. The left half is roofed by a great golden tree whose canopy fills the top corner and hangs out across the centre; the right half is open to a clean blue sky with white cloud. Walk down the left of this street and you are in dappled shade, walk down the right and you are in the sun, and the painting has been arranged so that both are visible at once.

That tree is worked in chrome yellow, gold and a little orange, thousands of small flat dabs on a network of thin dark branches, and its trunk comes down at the left through a market stall. Beneath it a pale awning is stretched over a low table, and the shade under the fabric is the darkest passage in the picture.

The street recedes as a straight corridor and the buildings are stacked along both sides in grey, ochre and umber, growing paler and looser as they go back until the far end is only a smudge of light. Blue tarpaulins are strung across the right hand shopfronts at the middle distance, and magenta bougainvillea crowds the wall beneath them.

At the right a utility pole stands close to the viewer, carrying a small white box of meters and a bracket, and its dark upright is the one thing in the picture that reaches from the pavement to the top of the canvas. It is placed almost on the edge of the frame, which pushes the street further away.

Fallen yellow leaves cover the road from the lower left to the centre. A bicycle heaped with produce stands at the lower left with its vendor in a conical hat, three women in pink, white and ochre walk away down the middle, and small figures move among the stalls beyond them. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside an old street glowing under a golden tree at sunset and cyclos and flower laden bicycles beneath a bright canopy.