Flower Seller with Marigold Baskets by a Yellow Wall — Print & Oil Painting

Symmetry organises this photograph, which is a camera image and not a painting. A vendor stands with her back to the camera in the centre of the frame, a bamboo carrying pole across both shoulders, and a laden basket hangs from each end at very nearly the same height. The whole image is arranged around that balance.

The wall behind is a single saturated yellow ochre carried from edge to edge, weathered in patches and darkening toward the corners, with a narrow band of dull red along the base and a strip of pale pavement at the bottom. The measured saturation is the highest of any work in this group, and the wall alone is responsible for it.

The two baskets carry different stock. The one at the left is heaped with marigold yellow and orange blooms with a spray of long spiky green leaves standing out of it; the one at the right holds red and orange flowers over wrapped bundles and a sheet of plastic. Both are wide, shallow and dark, each slung on four cords.

She is entirely anonymous. A conical hat covers the head completely from this angle, and she wears a rust brown jacket, dark olive trousers and sandals, with both hands raised to grip the pole where it crosses her shoulders. Nothing of her face, her age or her expression is available to us.

What the photograph records instead is the geometry of the work: two hands, one pole, two weights and a wall. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a flower seller carrying baskets on a shoulder pole and a woman in white ao dai walking past an ochre wall in Hoi An.