Fruit Boats and Basket Carriers Crossing a Canal at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

A flat red disc hangs in the upper centre of a bright blue sky, and it is the strangest decision in the picture. It has no glow around it, no colour bleeding into the clouds, no warm cast on the water below. The painter has simply placed a circle of vermilion against blue, the way a sun is drawn rather than the way one is observed, and the rest of the canvas carries on in full daylight.

The water is turquoise and it fills the lower two thirds. It is worked in horizontal strokes of clear blue green with paler streaks for the current, and it is bright enough to compete with the sky. Along its banks the earth is a strong ochre, and that opposition of orange bank against blue green water repeats at every edge in the picture.

Boats are the inventory here. A long plank boat with two figures and a heap of large woven baskets crosses the lower centre. A second, smaller craft carries a figure in a conical hat just above it. Two empty hulls lie against the right bank, and a fifth boat sits by the bridge. All are painted the same warm brown as the banks, so they read as objects belonging to the land rather than to the water.

A plank footbridge on thin posts crosses the canal at the middle distance, and a figure in blue stands on it with a shoulder pole. On the left bank three more carriers walk a path in single file, two in red shirts and one in blue, each with a pole across the shoulders and a load swinging at either end. They are the only figures given repeated colour, and the repetition makes them read as a working party.

Palms lean in from the left, a heavy trunked tree with fine pale foliage closes the right, and thatched houses with orange roofs sit on both banks in the middle distance. The measured hue falls in the cyans and green cyans, which the canal accounts for by area alone. From our Vietnam collection, alongside a vibrant canal market with boats beneath warm golden light and basket boats on a canal through golden fields.