Pink Flowers Framing a Stone Bridge Beneath a Banyan Tree — Print & Oil Painting

Start at the lower left corner, because that is where this painting is most domestic. A thatched house sits behind a low bamboo fence with a large straw stack beside it, the stack painted in dry golden strokes and almost as tall as the roof. In front of it a shrub carries dense pink and magenta bloom, the hottest colour anywhere on the canvas, and beyond that a few small figures in red walk a path between vegetable beds.

The stone bridge crosses the stream at the centre of the frame, low and single arched, its parapet pale grey against the blue water. It is the joint between the two halves of the village: the working ground on the left, the ceremonial ground on the right. Everything on foot in this picture has to pass over it.

Above the bridge the banyan spreads. Its trunk is a bundle of grown together roots, ridged and pale, and it carries a canopy that reaches almost the full height of the sky band. A thatched shelter with a golden roof leans against its base, and just to the right an arched gateway under red tile marks the entrance to the far part of the settlement.

The right third is the formal quarter: a long tiled hall with upturned ridges, a rectangular water tank edged in stone, palms, and a black buffalo grazing on open grass with two small red figures near it. Further back, yellow fields run to a line of trees and a pale sky.

Water closes the picture along the bottom. Lily pads sit in the shallows, a bare branched stem rises out of them, and a boat with a single figure lies at the lower right corner. The canvas is wide and low in proportion, and the painter has used that shape to lay the whole village out side by side rather than in depth. Part of our Vietnam collection, near an ox cart passing a banyan below distant blue mountains and a panoramic countryside with a river and footbridge.