Cyclo Carriage Passing a Farmer with a Shoulder Pole — Print & Oil Painting

Every doorway and every window opening along this street has been filled with a warm chrome yellow, five or six of them stepping back along both sides, and each one is brighter than the sky above the roofs. The sky itself is a pale washed cream with nothing in it at all. The village, in other words, is lit from indoors, and reversing the usual arrangement in this way gives a daytime scene the quiet of an evening.

The lane picks that yellow up and carries it forward. It runs from the middle distance down to the bottom edge as a broad sweep of gold and ochre, smoothly blended with no stroke visible anywhere, and it takes up close to half the canvas. The finish throughout the picture is soft and airless, edges feathered into one another, closer to an airbrushed surface than to a worked one.

Two trees frame the street. The one at the left is orange and rust, dropping leaves down the whole left margin onto a white wall; the one at the right is green shot with gold, larger, and its trunk rises through the full height of the canvas. Between them the houses are plain: white walls, red brown tiled roofs, a timber gate, a low boundary wall.

The farmer stands at the centre of the road with his back to us, in a conical hat and dark clothing, a shoulder pole balanced across his shoulders with a load at either end. He is small, he is exactly on the middle line of the canvas, and he is walking away from the viewer into the light.

Beyond him a cyclo carries two passengers across the picture from left to right, its red frame the strongest colour in the work, its driver bent to the pedals. The two meet in the same short stretch of road and neither is looking at the other. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a grandfather and child walking past a straw pile in the alley and a cyclist with flowers riding through a golden autumn street.