Three Buffalo Submerged in Turquoise Water — Print & Oil Painting

Two very different levels of realism share this canvas. The water is an invented colour, a flat bright turquoise laid in long horizontal bands with pale ripple lines scratched across it, holding no reflection of any sky and offering almost no depth. The animals standing in it are painted with something close to photographic care.

The largest lies across the upper left, submerged to the middle of the ribs, and its back is the best passage in the work: a broad pale grey plane worked with rust and umber patches, a scatter of fine hairs along the spine, the shoulder blade showing through the hide. Its horns sweep up and out in two clean pale curves, and the nearer one catches the strongest light in the picture.

Two more heads occupy the lower right and they face opposite ways. The closer is turned toward us and down with the muzzle almost touching the surface, a white blaze over the nose, a heavy fringe of coarse hair between the horns and the eye set deep in a fold of skin. The further one looks away to the right, showing only the crown, one horn and part of the muzzle above water.

The hide is where the painting spends itself. Every fold at the throat is drawn, the wet line where water meets flank is sharp and unbroken, and the horns carry their fine parallel growth ridges along the whole length.

One small dark shape floats near the lower left corner with a short reflection beneath it, and it is the only other thing in the frame. There is no bank, no sky, no vegetation and no herdsman. Part of our Vietnam collection, near a farmer bathing buffalo submerged in green water and a boy riding a buffalo along a riverbank with the herd.