Three Bathers in a Moonlit Lotus Pond — Print & Oil Painting

One warm passage governs the whole canvas. A white disc sits high at the centre inside a broad wheel of yellow green light, and that halo has been scrubbed outward until it catches in the leaves behind it. Every other colour in the picture is a blue or a green measured away from that single source.

Three figures stand in the water and each has been given a different attitude. At the left one is arched backwards with the head thrown down and the dark hair falling clear, arms lifted, a pale veil hanging from the hip. At the centre a second kneels with her back to us, hair pinned into a heavy black knot. At the right the third stands waist deep and turned toward the light, both arms raised behind the head. Read across, they work as one movement caught at three points.

The water is handled as a flat lane rather than as depth. A band of pale green runs across the middle of the canvas where the light lands on the surface, and below it the pond closes into darker green with no reflection drawn at all. On the right a sheet of translucent blue is pulled down through the water, painted as a hanging veil rather than as cloth carried in a current.

Lotus crowd the lower corners. Fleshy dark leaves overlap along the bottom edge, and four or five closed buds stand on thick stems, each one a pointed shape lit with a cold blue white. They are placed in front of the figures and they are what sets the distance in an image that otherwise refuses to recede.

Very little light and a great deal of colour: the readings say as much, a dark canvas whose greens and blues never once weaken. From our Vietnam collection, near a wide lotus lake beneath a golden horizon and a full moon rising over a silhouetted stilt hut.