Silhouette of a Cyclist Crossing a Bamboo Bridge at Twilight — Print & Oil Painting

Everything here is either a silhouette or the sky behind it. There is no third category and no local colour anywhere except one jacket, which is what gives the image its force.

The bridge is a lattice. Bamboo poles run out along the deck in two rails, cross one another in braces underneath, and drop into the water on splayed legs, all of it black and all of it drawn as line rather than mass. A heavier pole rises at the right and another cuts diagonally across the upper centre, so the structure reads as a tangle rather than as a span, and it runs off both edges of the canvas.

The sky is divided by temperature. Deep violet holds the upper left and the top, warming through magenta into a bank of scarlet and orange cloud at the upper right, then dropping to a pale yellow and cream band along the horizon. The water repeats that whole sequence upside down, and the bridge legs continue into it as a second lattice, softer and broken.

A single figure occupies the middle of the deck with her back to us, pushing a bicycle. Her conical hat is a pale cream triangle, the only light shape anywhere in the silhouette, and her jacket is a strong red that belongs to no part of the sky. A red basket hangs from the handlebars. Those two reds sit almost exactly on the centre line of the picture.

The surface looks worked and slightly damaged, with fine cracks and lifted flecks running through the darker passages and out across the sky. From our Vietnam collection, near a full moon rising over a silhouetted stilt hut and the red Huc bridge leading to Ngoc Son temple.