Cyclists Riding Through a Misty Blue Village at Night — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours carry this long panorama and they are sorted by height. Everything above the bank is teal: the thatched roofs at the left, the trees at the right, the haze between them, the riders crossing the middle. Everything at the waterline is acid green, in a wide raft of round lily pads and a scatter of leaves along the far edge. The measured saturation is very high, which is easy to miss in a picture that reads as quiet, and this is the reason: both hues are pushed hard and neither is diluted by a third.

The bank is the only firm line in the work. It runs level across the upper middle, and the cyclists ride along it in single file, four together at the centre and two more away at the right edge, each in a white ao dai with a conical hat and each given no face at all. Their bicycles get two thin ellipses for wheels and almost nothing else.

Below them the water is still enough to double the reeds. Thin dark stems rise from the surface in loose clumps, and under each clump lies a softer copy of it, greyed and slightly displaced. A low footbridge crosses at the centre, reduced to a few pale planks.

One figure sits apart from the others. At the lower right, close to us and much larger than anyone on the bank, a woman in a rose coloured top and a conical hat kneels in a narrow boat, and she carries the only warm note on the canvas. The title calls this night, though the picture offers no moon, no lamp and no star: the hour is held entirely by the blue. From our Vietnam collection, near ao dai students walking beneath a green tree canopy and the same subject reduced to figures in a soft grey haze.