Lone Fisherman Poling a Sampan Across a Misty Golden River — Print & Oil Painting

Almost nothing is in this painting, and that is the whole design. Something close to four fifths of the surface is a single pale field of cream, oyster and warm grey, brushed smooth, in which water and sky are not separated by any line at all. There is no horizon. The eye is given nothing to hold on to across most of the canvas.

Two gold bands interrupt it. The first runs the full width across the upper third, a thick textured strip of ochre and old gold with the paint visibly raised, standing for a far bank of reed or ripening rice. The second enters from the left edge at mid height as a shorter tongue of the same colour, closer to us and slightly darker underneath. They are the only firm structures in the picture.

The boat sits just right of centre in the empty middle. It is small, perhaps a fifteenth of the width of the canvas, painted as a long dark curve with both ends lifted, and behind the figure a rounded amber load or canopy takes up the stern. A single fisherman stands at the near end under a conical hat, leaning into a pole that rises at a steep angle and reads as one thin dark stroke.

Beneath the hull the reflection is given as three or four soft horizontal smears that fade within a hand span of the boat and then stop. It is the only evidence that the pale field is water rather than air, and the painter has kept it deliberately weak.

The measured saturation is the lowest of any work in this group and the brightness among the highest, which is exactly what a canvas of pale neutrals with two ochre accents should read. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside an aerial view of a fisherman resting in his boat and an abstract peach-toned reflection of a single boat at sunset.