Boy in Red Leading Buffalo and Calf Along a Misty Path — Print & Oil Painting

Three animals are on this path and they are ranked by size from front to back. The big buffalo leads at the left with a full spread of horn curving up and outward, a second adult follows a little behind it with a narrower head, and a calf brings up the rear at the far edge, barely taller than the grass, its horns still short buds. Lined up that way the group reads as one family measured out across the canvas, and it is worth noting that the title counts a buffalo and a calf where the picture holds two grown animals and the young one.

The boy is the only one facing us. He stands on the green verge at the right, feet apart in plastic sandals, in a plain red T shirt, black shorts and a conical straw hat, one hand held out to the side on a slack rope that runs across to the leading animal's nose. His body is square to the viewer while every animal is in strict profile, and that single difference is what makes him the subject rather than one more figure in a line.

The surface has been rubbed smooth throughout. No stroke is visible anywhere: the hides blend from grey through violet to near white along the spines, the grass moves through its greens by gradient rather than by mark, and every edge is feathered instead of cut. It gives the scene a still, slightly airless quality.

The setting closes in from both sides. Dense foliage packs the left edge, a bank of trees and bamboo runs up the right, and between them a pale opening is left in the centre where the track continues into a blue white haze. That gap is the only distance in the work, and the two verges have been kept dark so that the eye keeps returning to it. From our Vietnam collection, beside a boy hauling two pale buffalo through a deep olive haze and children playing beside a buffalo under a banyan tree.