Woman in Yellow Ao Dai by a Lake with a Red Pavilion — Print & Oil Painting

Yellow surrounds her on every side and she is dressed in it too. A golden ao dai holds the centre of the canvas, a terracotta pot of yellow blooms stands on a table at the right, a spray of small yellow flowers hangs down from the top right corner, and another bunch is closed in her raised hand. The picture is one hue examined at four or five different strengths.

One passage refuses to belong to it. Away at the upper left, across the water, a red arched bridge runs on slim posts behind a low railing, painted in a few strokes of vermilion. It is the only built structure in a canvas otherwise made of cloth, water and blossom, and the composition keeps sending the eye back to it.

She sits on a low pale ledge turned toward us, one hand resting on the stone at her side and the other lifted to the shoulder with the flowers in it. Her hair is long and loosely waved, brown lit with gold along the crown, and the face is painted more softly than anything else present: level brows, a small red mouth, the modelling kept almost flat.

The left third of the canvas is given over to a bank of orange and scarlet flowers on tall green stems, worked in short thick strokes with the ground left showing between them. Behind that the lake crosses the picture as a pale grey green sheet, with trees and a low far bank above it.

The title names a red pavilion. What the painting puts in that position is a bridge: a raised red walkway carried on posts over the water, with no roof and no enclosure of any kind. Part of our Vietnam collection, near the red Huc bridge leading to Ngoc Son temple and a woman with a fan leaning by a lake.