Travelers Resting Under a Banyan Tree by a Footbridge — Print & Oil Painting

Two panels of golden thatch are the brightest objects in this wide landscape, and they are what the composition is built around. They roof an open sided stall standing at the foot of the banyan, pitched at a shallow angle and laid in long strokes of straw yellow, and against the browns of the trunk behind them they read almost as light rather than as material. The stall has no walls, and nobody is under it.

The banyan behind it is old and the painter says so through the trunk: a broad ribbed mass of fused roots rising in vertical ridges, wider at the base than at the top, with the canopy carried well above the frame of the picture. A second tree, lighter and greener, stands to its right.

The paths are the real structure of the painting. One runs from the lower centre up past the stall to an ochre gateway with a red tiled roof and an arched opening. Another curves right toward a tiled communal building and a circular pond with a low stone ornament at its centre. A third crosses a small humpbacked stone bridge at the bottom of the frame. They meet, divide and rejoin across the whole width, and the eye follows them rather than any single subject.

People are few and they are given as small marks. A walker in a conical hat with a shoulder pole climbs the path below the gate. Two figures in red stand out on the grass at the right, and a dark buffalo grazes near them at the lower right edge. Away to the left a stream runs down between banks of shrub, with houses and a haystack beyond it.

Beyond all of it the land opens into flat yellow fields and then into low blue hills under a pale sky. The value measures high and the saturation moderate, which is what a canvas of yellow field, green bank and pale sky produces. Part of our Vietnam collection, near an old village gate by a winding river and rice fields and a village gate with a cart on a golden dirt path.