Ox Cart Passing a Banyan Tree Below Distant Blue Mountains — Print & Oil Painting

The far distance is what separates this landscape from its neighbours. Above the fields the painter has laid a range of blue mountains, pale and flattened by haze, running across the upper centre beneath white cumulus. Nothing else in the picture is that cool or that far away, and its presence pushes the whole village forward toward the viewer.

Under the banyan at the left, a gathering. A thatched shelter stands against the great ribbed trunk and a cluster of six or seven figures sits and stands beneath it, their conical hats given as small pale ovals. Stone steps lead down from them to the water at the lower left corner, where two more women in hats are working at the edge. It is the busiest square of the canvas and also the shadiest.

The cart crosses the middle ground on a pale dirt road. A dark buffalo pulls it, head low against the yoke, and a driver in white sits up on the frame behind. The road runs from the left edge, bends around the tree, straightens toward an ochre gateway with a red tiled roof, and carries two walking figures in red beyond it. The cart is small, perhaps a fortieth of the width of the picture, and it is the only thing in motion.

On the right the architecture becomes formal. A long communal hall stands under sweeping red tiled roofs with ornamented ridges, and in front of it lies an oval water tank, its rim built up in pale stone and its surface flat pale blue. The geometry there is deliberate and symmetrical, and it contrasts directly with the informal thatch and mud of the left half.

The foreground right is domestic: a low thatched house, a wooden handcart, a very large straw stack the colour of the road, white flowering shrubs, and a few figures moving between them. Yellow rice fields fill the gaps between all of it. The saturation measures moderate and the hue sits in the yellows and oranges. From our Vietnam collection, alongside travellers and an open stall beneath a banyan by a footbridge and farmers plowing beside a flock of egrets in the mountains.