Red-Sailed Junk Passing the Cliffs of Ha Long Bay — Print & Oil Painting

This is brushwork on a small scale and most of the sheet is water and mist. The limestone islands behind are put in as broad grey violet washes with soft upper edges and no drawing at all, paling as they recede, and the sky above them is left almost bare. Everything in the background has been stated in one or two strokes and then left alone.

Against that the main sail is the only fully saturated shape in the picture. It is a deep orange red, cut into six or seven panels by dark batten lines that fan out from the mast, and each panel bulges slightly with the wind. Two smaller sails accompany it, one ochre yellow forward and one brown behind, both painted more thinly, and the mast rises as a single dry stroke.

The hull below is a long shallow crescent of warm brown with a pale load amidships, and one figure stands on the deck in a blue tunic, no more than three marks high. A second junk sits at the right with a dark sail and a pale hull, smaller and paler, and it is the only thing establishing that this is a working stretch of water rather than an empty one.

A blossoming branch enters from the top right and hangs over the scene, worked in bright green leaves and small red flowers with a fine dark twig running through them. It belongs to the very front of the picture, far nearer than anything else, and it frames the top of the composition in the manner of a great deal of East Asian landscape painting. A dark rock with foliage answers it at the lower left.

Beneath the junk the red of the sail returns on the water as a short broken column of horizontal strokes, and it is the only reflection given to anything. The measured saturation is low and the brightness high, which is what a pale washed sheet carrying one small hot passage will read. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a junk sailing past cranes among the same islands and a fleet of red sailed junks among golden islets.