Woman in White Ao Dai Seated Among Coral Blossom Flowers — Print & Oil Painting

The flowers are in front of her, beside her and behind her, and the picture is really about that enclosure. Tall thin branches rise from the bottom edge and cross the whole width of the canvas, carrying hundreds of small blooms in coral, salmon and pale rose along with green and yellow buds, and several of them pass directly across her arm and shoulder. She is inside the shrub rather than posed against it.

Everything is soft. There is not one hard edge anywhere on the canvas: the branches blur into the background, the background blurs into the sky, and even her face is given with the gentlest possible transitions. The measured contrast is among the lowest in this group and the picture is built to be read at a distance rather than close up.

Her hair does most of the drawing. It falls in long loose waves from the crown down over her right shoulder to the waist, dark brown lifted with warm lights, and its mass is the only firmly stated shape in the composition. Small pink blossoms sit against it where a branch crosses behind.

The ao dai is white going to pale grey and cream, the collar high and buttoned, the sleeves long and close, and it is painted with so little contrast that in places it dissolves into the pale ground entirely. Her head is tipped down and to her right, the eyes lowered, the expression settled rather than sad.

The canvas is wide and shallow, which crops the figure at the hip and gives most of the surface to the blossom on either side of her. The saturation measures low and the value sits below the middle. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a woman in ao dai holding a book amid yellow blossoms and a woman in white ao dai sitting barefoot on a misty lotus dock.