Woman Leaning Over Lotus Blossoms Beside a Pond — Print & Oil Painting

The scale in this picture has been tampered with deliberately. The lotus pad along the bottom edge is as wide as the figure's shoulders, tilted toward us so that its whole ribbed surface shows, with a single bead of water sitting on it. Nothing in the image justifies a leaf that size except the wish to put the plant first.

Two blossoms rise out of that foreground. The larger opens at the centre right on a thick curving stem, its petals white with crimson tips and a yellow crown at the middle; the smaller stands away at the left on a stem so thin it barely holds. Both are painted with hard clean edges against a field that has none.

She leans forward from the waist above them with the head turned down and to the side, the eyes lowered and the mouth just short of a smile. Her hair falls as one long unbroken black sheet down the right of the body, and a white gauze wrap is drawn across the torso, its edge dissolving into the mist wherever it leaves the light.

The right edge of the canvas is the only heavily loaded area in the work. A spent leaf and a dried pod are built there in thick gold and bronze paint with the knife, standing well proud of the surface, and they answer the fresh green of the foreground from one side of the canvas to the other.

Everything between those two edges is soft: pale green, grey and cold blue laid wet into wet, with no horizon and no bank to stand the figure on. Part of our Vietnam collection, near a woman in white ao dai sitting barefoot on a misty lotus dock and a woman resting among lotus leaves and seed pods.