Four Women in Ao Dai Standing with Bicycles Under Palm Trees — Print & Oil Painting

This is a group portrait and the bicycles are furniture. Four women stand in a line across the middle of the canvas, each holding a machine upright beside her by the handlebars, and every one of them has stopped and turned to face the painter. Nobody is riding and nobody is about to.

They are posed rather than caught. The two at the left stand square with both hands on the bars; the third has turned her shoulders and let one arm drop; the fourth, at the right, has swung her hip out and rests a hand on the saddle, and she is the only one whose hat is pushed back far enough to leave the whole face open.

The four bicycles are not one machine painted four times. One carries a black wire basket, one a grey basket, one a shallow tray heaped with pink and red blooms, and the last has a dark bag slung at the rear; their frames differ in colour and one stands noticeably taller than the rest.

Behind them the palms take over. Great fronds radiate from two trunks at the centre and the right, each leaf drawn as a spine with fine ribs running off it, and they fill the upper half so completely that the pale sky survives only in the top left corner and in one small gap at the right. A low green hedge runs along the foot of them.

The ground is a pale dirt road brushed in cream and buff with soft blue shadows dropped beneath each wheel. The dresses are white shot through with cool blue, and against that mass of dark green they read almost as light sources. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, alongside four women in ao dai cycling through a green bamboo lane and four ao dai women cycling across a golden backdrop.