Woman with a Fan Leaning by a Lake Facing a Distant Pagoda — Print & Oil Painting

Two trunks frame her like a doorway. One rises hard against the left edge and another, thicker and lit down one side, closes the right, and both run the full height of the canvas. She stands in the gap between them with a hand laid flat against the right hand trunk, and that contact is what fixes her to the place.

The dress is a pale blue silver that takes almost every colour in the picture into itself: lilac along the sleeve, a cool green in the skirt, warm cream at the waist where light comes off the water behind. Its folds are painted in long confident strokes that follow the length of the body rather than crossing it.

Her hair is the surprise. Instead of the usual straight black it falls in loose auburn and chestnut waves to below the shoulder, catching yellow where the foliage overhead is brightest. The face is turned to us, the cheeks flushed, the brows dark and level, the mouth small and red.

A fan is held low at the hip in the near hand, pale and faintly coloured, its shape half lost against the dress. Above, the canopy is a scatter of chrome yellow leaves on thin dark twigs, and behind her a flat pale lake crosses the middle of the canvas with a small white structure standing on its far bank at the upper left.

The title has her facing a distant pagoda. In the painting that building sits behind her shoulder and she is looking straight out at the viewer instead. From our Vietnam collection, near a woman in yellow ao dai by a lake with a red pavilion and a golden autumn tree over a village lake.