Stilt Houses by the River Under a Leafy Tree — Print & Oil Painting

The water takes up half of this canvas and the artist has painted it as a mirror that does not quite work. Below the houses the reflections come apart into horizontal bars of teal, grey, rust and pale pink, each dragged sideways and never lining up with the object above it. The surface is busier than the thing it reflects, and the picture is livelier for it.

The houses stand on thin bare stilts driven into the river. Their roofs are corrugated sheet painted in gold ochre streaked with rust, the walls a mixture of raw timber and bright blue panelling, and the whole cluster leans and overlaps as though built one room at a time. Under the nearest eaves a small figure in white with a conical hat stands on the open veranda, no larger than a thumbnail and the only person in the scene.

Above the roofs a single round tree fills the upper left, its foliage laid on as hundreds of separate leaf shaped dabs in teal and sap green rather than as a mass, so light passes between them. A darker bush sits below it. On the far bank a low green treeline runs out to the right edge and dissolves into haze.

The sky is a soft blue washed through with lavender and dusty pink, and the whole picture is keyed low in saturation apart from the roofs. A long dark sampan, empty, points in from the right and gives the composition its only strong diagonal. From our Vietnam collection, near a rainy water village with a boat passing through and blue toned stilt houses among reeds with two moored boats.