Woman in White Drapery Beside a Dim Reflection — Print & Oil Painting

The picture contains its subject twice. At the left a figure stands with her back to us, the shoulders and the line of the spine carefully modelled in warm cream and rose. At the right, half lost in the wall, a second appears at perhaps a third of that strength: the same hair gathered at the crown, the head turned into profile, everything else dissolved into ochre and brown. No frame, no glass and no edge tell us it is a reflection. The painter simply lets it stand there.

A white sheet is the brightest thing on the canvas. It is caught in one hand at the hip and falls to the bottom edge, laid on in thick loaded strokes with the folds scraped back rather than drawn, so the cloth reads as accumulated paint before it reads as linen.

One small red blossom is pinned into the hair at the crown, and it is the only saturated note in the work. Everything else lives in a narrow warm range of cream, oatmeal, dull rose and grey, with a cold blue vertical dragged down the middle of the background as the single interruption.

What holds the two halves together is a gradient of finish. The near shoulder and the nape are worked to a high polish, the arm below is broader, and by the time the eye reaches the second figure the handling has become pure smear. The picture is about how much description a form needs before we accept it.

Warm colour dominates every reading taken off this surface, and the ochre wall accounts for nearly all of it. Part of our Vietnam collection; for another figure left half described on bare ground, see a watercolour sketch of a woman in a flowing teal gown, and for a head carried all the way to finish, a golden toned portrait of a woman with downcast eyes.