Golden Autumn Trees Reflected Beside a Bamboo Fence and Gate — Print & Oil Painting

This is the most stripped down painting in the group. There are four elements and no others: two trees, a paling fence, a gate, and a flat pale surface below. No sky detail, no distance, no figures, no incident. The picture works by leaving things out.

The trees are made entirely of dots. Small rounded touches of cadmium yellow, amber and pale gold are stamped across two roughly circular masses, one at the upper left and a larger one at the upper right, and the grey blue of the sky is left showing between them everywhere. A few thin dark branches are drawn through the right hand canopy. There is no leaf shape anywhere, only the repeated dab.

The fence runs the full width at mid height, built from close set vertical staves in weathered grey brown, bound by two horizontal rails. At its centre is a plank gate under a small pitched roof of grey shingle, and the gate is the only element given a hard geometric edge. It is shut.

Below the fence the ground is a smooth pale plane of grey, blue and cream that reads as still water, and the gate drops a soft vertical reflection into it. Fallen yellow leaves are scattered across that surface in the same dabs used for the canopies, thickest at the foot of the right hand tree and thinning toward the left.

The measured contrast is the lowest of any work in this group, and the picture confirms it: there is no black, no white, and the darkest note is the muted brown of the palings. From our Vietnam collection, alongside old street pavement reflecting a golden autumn tree and a branch of red blossoms in ink and watercolour style.