Fishermen Beside Drying Nets Under a Flowering Tree — Print & Oil Painting

Two tall golden screens stand in the water on the left and they are the most solid objects in an otherwise vaporous painting. Each is a broad rectangle of ochre and amber hung on a frame, ribbed with fine vertical lines, rising well above the surface, and they are the only saturated colour in the lower half of the canvas. Everything else on that side dissolves into grey.

The tree opposite them is the second event. It grows from the right edge on a dark trunk that leans out over the water, its branches reaching almost to the centre of the picture, and its foliage is stippled in mid green with dozens of small orange red blooms scattered through it. A long bare limb drops from it toward the surface and nearly touches.

Between the two, the working water. A boat sits low in the lower centre with a figure in a conical hat crouched at the stern behind a pale rounded basket, and a second boat lies just beyond it with a standing figure and a similar load. Thin poles and lines rise out of the water around them at slight angles, and a few small birds float at the right.

The whole background is weather. A grey hill sits behind the tree, softened almost to nothing, and above it the sky is worked in blown grey and white with no hard edge anywhere. A second, lower bank of green foliage appears at the left behind the screens. The recession is achieved entirely by lightening, not by drawing.

The canvas is upright and the tree uses the full height of it, which is what keeps the composition from settling into a simple horizontal. The measured saturation is low and the value moderate, an honest reading of grey water carrying two warm accents. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside fishing boats anchored at dusk beneath palm trees and a junk boat sailing past cranes in Ha Long Bay.