Vietnamese Flower Vendors Sitting in the Rain — Print & Oil Painting

Three vendors sit with their backs to us in a row across the lower left, and each has been given a colour and nothing else. A dusty rose jacket, a green one, a blue one. No faces, no hands, barely a shoulder between them, only three rounded masses of cloth under three pale conical hats set at three slightly different heights.

The flowers are what the picture is really counting. Four shallow round baskets stand on the ground around the group, two heaped with marigold yellow and orange at the left, another directly in front, and a fourth at the right filled with pale pink. Every blossom is a separate stiff dab of unmixed paint, and packed together they build dense mounds that are easily the brightest things on the canvas.

The background splits cleanly down the middle behind them. Its left half is a warm brown mauve wall worked in broad horizontal slabs with a few paler rectangles set into it. Its right half is a flat cool grey, almost empty, holding only the faintest suggestion of a distant roof. That division is arbitrary and entirely convincing, and it places the vendors firmly on the warm side.

Over all of it the rain has been dragged in with the edge of the knife: long near vertical white lines, evenly spaced, crossing wall, ground, baskets and figures without distinction. They do not stop at the edge of any object, which is what makes the weather feel like something between us and the scene rather than something inside it. The wet ground gives the baskets back as short smeared verticals. Part of our Vietnam collection, near flower sellers sitting in the rain before a misty pagoda and vendors sorting piles of marigolds and pink blooms.