Boy Leading Two Buffalo Through a Hazy Golden Field — Print & Oil Painting

A single taut line runs from the boy's hands to the nose of the nearer buffalo, and the whole picture is arranged around the pull along it. He has thrown his weight back onto his heels, both arms straight, shoulders behind his hips, and the rope leaves him at chest height and drops slightly to the animal. The two buffalo lean the other way. It is a small study in opposed forces and it needs nothing else.

The animals are painted pale against a dark ground, which reverses the usual arrangement. Their backs and flanks are a chalky grey white with the light sitting along the spine, and the horns are the largest shapes in the work: the near pair sweeping up and back in a wide lyre, the far pair lower and heavier. Their legs disappear into the murk below the knee.

He is small beside them. A conical hat, a pale shirt open at the neck, dark trousers rolled to the calf, bare feet planted in dry stubble, and no face given at all beyond a shadow under the brim. The rope, the shirt and the hat are the only light things on his side of the canvas.

The setting has been kept deliberately vague. A deep olive haze fills the upper half with no sky, no horizon and no tree resolved anywhere inside it, and the ground below is a scrubbed patch of ochre and dull gold with a dark mound at the right. Whatever the weather is, it is thick enough that the far buffalo has already begun to soften at the edges. From our Vietnam collection, beside a boy in red walking a buffalo and its calf through mist and a boy riding a buffalo along a riverbank with the rest of the herd.