Geese Swimming Among Lotus Blooms Beside a Village Gate — Print & Oil Painting

The lotus in the lower right corner is painted at a scale nothing else in the picture receives. Three or four blooms in clear rose and cream stand on thick stems above a raft of flat green pads, and each petal is modelled individually. They sit right at the front of the canvas, close to the viewer, and everything else in the village is read past them and therefore at a distance.

Between them and the far bank runs the river, and it is bright blue. Thirteen or fourteen white geese are strung across it in a loose diagonal from the lower left to the centre, each bird a small hooked shape with an orange bill, some with their necks up and some down to the water. They are spread out rather than bunched, and their scattering fills what would otherwise be an empty band of blue.

The banyan stands at the centre on a spit of golden ground, its buttressed trunk pale and heavily modelled, its canopy an even dome of mid green. To the right of it the village gate rises in tiers of red tile over ochre walls, and small figures move on the ground below it: one in red, one in blue, a dark buffalo, a woman with a shoulder pole. A white arched footbridge crosses the water further left.

The left third belongs to autumn. Trees in orange, rust and violet crowd behind the tiled and thatched roofs of a second cluster of houses, with a straw stack and a small red figure among them, and behind those a blue mountain rises against the sky. That corner is the only place where the colour turns away from green and blue.

Birds cross the upper sky in small dark hooks, three at the left and three at the right. The measured saturation is among the highest in this group, which a canvas holding full strength blue, green, rose and orange side by side will always produce. Part of our Vietnam collection, near a wide lotus lake beneath a golden horizon and a close-up pink lotus with small fish below.