Woman Carrying Baskets on a Sunlit Forest Path with Chickens — Print & Oil Painting

Nearly every square inch of this canvas is green, and the painter has made that restriction the point. Mid green, olive, sap, a cooler blue green in the deep shade, and a yellow green where sun reaches the ground: the whole tonal range is drawn from one hue, and the picture is legible only because the values are handled so carefully. Trees fill the top, banks of shrub fill the sides, and grass fills the floor.

Light comes down through the canopy in patches rather than beams. The path is mottled with pale gold where the leaves let it through and grey green where they do not, and the pattern is irregular enough to read as real dappling rather than as decoration. Two slim pale trunks rise through the right side and catch that light along one edge, which is what gives the space its depth.

The woman is the only saturated thing in the painting. Her tunic is a clear rose pink, and it sits at the centre of the canvas surrounded on all sides by green, so the eye finds her immediately and keeps returning. She walks away from us under a conical hat, a shoulder pole across her back, two shallow round baskets hanging from its ends and heaped with something leafy and pale.

Down in the lower left corner the birds are painted with a lighter, quicker hand than anything else. A rust and black cockerel stands nearest, tail up, and three or four hens peck in the grass behind him, their bodies given as small warm smudges. They are the only warm colour outside the figure, and the painter has kept them low and to one side.

Behind the walker the path bends and a low structure with a dark opening sits under the trees, barely drawn. A red flowering shrub marks the right hand edge. The measured saturation is among the lowest in this group, which is the honest reading of a canvas built from one colour in many values. Part of our Vietnam collection, near a woman washing clothes beside a well as a hen approaches and a woman drawing water at a stone well beside a house.