Rowboat Passing Stilt Houses Under a Quiet Grey Sky — Print & Oil Painting

The finest marks in this picture are the aerials. A row of thin dark verticals rises from the roofs along the right, each carrying two or three short cross bars, and they are the only sharp drawing on a canvas otherwise made of soft blocks. Everything else has been scraped on with a knife and left slightly open at the edges.

The key is very high and the colour very low, and the measurement agrees on both counts. White, oyster, pale blue grey and a dull silver do almost all the work. Water and sky are separated only by the far bank, and if that thin line of roofs were taken away the two would join without a seam.

Houses stand on stilts along the right, stepping back one behind another. Their roofs are corrugated sheet, ridged with short parallel strokes and stained with rust, ochre and pale blue, and their walls are open enough to show dark interiors. Beneath them the supports run down into the water as thin uprights, and a few small pieces of laundry, one red and one blue, hang from a rail.

Out on the left there is nothing at all for a long way. Half the canvas is empty water, and one small rowing boat has been set into that emptiness with two figures aboard, one in red and one in blue, neither larger than a thumbnail. They carry the only saturated colour in the work, and the composition is arranged so that the eye has to cross a wide pale field before it reaches them. Part of our Vietnam collection, near stilt houses among reeds keyed almost entirely to blue and a stilt village standing on a thicket of poles beneath a gold sky.