Woman in Blue Ao Dai Resting Against a Vase of Lotus Flowers — Print & Oil Painting

The whole picture is one long curve. She lies along a diagonal running up from the lower left corner, hip highest, shoulders dropping away, the head come to rest against the belly of a dark jar at the right, and the line of her back carries the eye from one corner of the canvas to the other without a break in it.

Behind her the ground repeats that movement. A brown black field has been worked with broad grey spirals and coils, smoke like and attached to nothing, curling in the upper left and again above the jar, and they turn the same way the body does. It is the only incident in an otherwise empty background.

The ao dai is a cool pale blue and it is the largest lit area on the canvas. The sleeves are modelled with long soft shadows, the outer panel spreads across the floor toward the bottom edge as a broad sheet, and one bare foot and one bare hand emerge from the cloth at either end of the figure.

Her eyes are closed, the mouth is small and red, and the head is tipped far enough over that the cheek rests directly on the jar. A little dark hair escapes at the crown. The face is the most carefully modelled passage in the work and the only place where warm colour appears in any quantity.

Out of the jar rise the lotus: two open pink blossoms with yellow centres, four or five closed buds on long stems, a flat green seed head and one broad pad at the top. The jar itself is a heavy earthenware belly in dark olive with a lotus leaf modelled in low relief on its side. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a woman in lavender ao dai asleep beside a vase of pink lotus and a woman in white ao dai resting her head on her hand by a vase.