Flower Cart Beside a Weathered Wall with a Green Shutter — Print & Oil Painting

Red appears in exactly two places here and the picture is built on the line between them. High at the centre right, a mass of scarlet flowers spills down the grey wall beside a shuttered window. Low at the left, a barrow heaped with blooms stands on the pavement, red through its middle with yellow and orange at either end. Draw a line from one to the other and it crosses the whole composition on the diagonal. Everything that line passes through is grey.

The wall is the largest thing in the work and it has been kept deliberately inert. Grey render over patched masonry, stained darker toward the base, with a black band of shadow along its foot and a concrete post standing at the upper left. Scraps of white paper are pasted and torn across both the wall and the post, a dozen at least, and they are the only rectangles in a composition where every other shape is soft edged.

The window supplies the one saturated cool note. Its two louvred leaves are closed and painted a strong blue green, set in a pale stone surround with a plain sill, and the flowers press against the right hand edge of it without ever crossing over.

The barrow itself is drawn in silhouette. A black frame and two spoked wheels carry the load, and a small pool of fallen petals lies on the paving beneath it. The ground takes the entire lower third as a broad pale sweep of cream and grey with almost nothing on it, so the two red events sit at the top and the left of a largely empty field. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a weathered wall with an orange door where the paint has been left to run and a bicycle propped against a patched brick alley wall.