Farmer Carrying Hay Bundles Through a Brick Village Gate — Print & Oil Painting

The whole lane has been given over to one crop. Cut straw is heaped along the top of the left hand wall in a long golden ridge, spread flat across the ground on the right in a wide drying bed, banked against the brickwork in the middle distance, and carried on the shoulders of the only person present. There is no room left on this street for anything else, and the painting has been arranged to make that clear.

The farmer comes toward the viewer down the centre. He wears a blue jacket and dark trousers under a conical hat, and across his shoulders sits a pole with a large bundle of green and gold stalks lashed at each end, wide enough that the loads reach past the width of his body. He is walking on the packed earth between the two drying areas, which is the only clear ground in the picture.

The walls on both sides are the second subject. They are built of old brick with grey render clinging in patches, capped unevenly, and pierced at the right by two square openings. Two heavy brick piers stand at the centre right where the lane meets a gateway, and the near one is the most solidly painted object in the canvas.

Behind all this the village closes the view: tiled roofs stepping back on both sides, a dark gable at the left, and three large trees whose crowns fill the upper third in dense green and umber. A single small figure stands far off at the end of the lane where the light breaks through.

The handling is smooth and tightly finished, every straw stem and every brick joint given its own mark, and the palette is held to gold, brick red, olive and grey. A signature sits in the lower left. Part of our Vietnam collection, near an elderly man with a cane on a lane beside a brick archway and an ox cart passing a banyan tree below distant blue mountains.