Boats Loading Crates Beneath Flowering Trees — Print & Oil Painting

The trees are ultramarine and nothing else in the picture is allowed to be that intense. Five canopies stand along the bank, each a dense sphere of small overlapping leaf dabs in cobalt and deep blue with paler blue breaking through, and they are painted at full strength against a sky and water that have been drained almost to silver. The contrast is the whole engine of the image.

Below them the trunks are thin and dark and their exposed root systems spread across the bank in fine tangled lines, drawn with a much finer instrument than the canopies above. That change of scale, from broad blue mass to hairline root, is one of the pleasures of looking closely at this canvas.

The water is the second subject. It is glassy, pale and almost without ripple, and a broad band of light runs straight down the centre of it from the horizon to the bottom edge. Every boat and every tree drops a long soft reflection into it, blue over silver, and those reflections take up as much of the canvas as the objects that cast them.

The boats are working, and the painter has been specific about it. Two lie at the left with woven arched covers and stacks of pale crates on their decks, figures in blue and red among them. A small sampan crosses the centre with a standing figure in yellow at the pole. Two more at the right are being loaded, one heaped with produce, one carrying a blue tarpaulin, and a figure in a conical hat bends over the gunwale.

At the right the bank rises into a market: a dozen small figures in yellow, white and red under pale blue awnings, painted as touches rather than as people. The measured hue sits in the blues and violets, and the contrast is among the highest in this group. From our Vietnam collection, near cyclists riding through a misty blue village at night and a rainy water village with a boat passing through.