Woman in a Blue Wrap Beside a Flowering Jar at Dusk — Print & Oil Painting

Not one brushmark survives anywhere in this painting. Every volume, the jar, the wall, the cloth, the shoulder, is modelled in a slow airless gradient, and the finish is closer to airbrush than to oil. That decision turns the whole scene into a set rather than a place.

The set is built from horizontal bands. A brown wooden wall runs across the top, a dark band cuts under it, a pale cream ledge crosses the middle, and a small white disc glows above that ledge like a lamp let into the panelling. A thin branch with dark green foliage enters at the top edge and is the only vertical in the background.

A large glazed jar stands right of centre, pale grey turning to warm ochre where the light reaches it, with a thick rolled lip. Down one side spills a plant of round green leaves and small red and pink flowers, and this is the one passage in the entire canvas put down in blunt separate dabs. Everything else is polished; the flowers are not.

She kneels in profile at the left with the head bowed. A blue band holds the hair, blue cords are tied at the back, and a long blue sash runs forward from the hip and spills off the bottom edge of the canvas in heavy folds. A dark green cloth lies across her lap and one hand holds a small pink bloom above it.

The blue is the only saturated colour present and the artist has given it to the figure alone, which is what keeps her from being swallowed by a background of browns and golds. From our Vietnam collection. Another figure set beside a vessel of flowers, in daylight rather than lamplight, is a woman in sage ao dai seated beside a vase of white flowers, and the nearest relative in this group is a woman in a red wrap seated beside a vase of lotus buds.