Ao Dai Woman Holding Lilies Beside a Clay Jar — Print & Oil Painting

Texture carries this square. The white ground has been built up with a knife into ridges, ripples and raised islands thick enough for the light to catch along their edges, and the paint stands physically off the surface all round the figure. Whiteness here is less a colour than a relief.

The woman is shown from the shoulders up in profile, turned into the frame, and her face has been left entirely blank. No eye, no mouth, no nostril, only a smooth pale plane between the hat and the jaw. Her hat is the strongest flat colour present, a warm mustard gold with a clean dark rim, and her ao dai is cream shot through with soft yellow streaks that follow the fall of the cloth.

Against her chest she holds a large bunch of white lilies in both hands. The blooms are worked in thick white with sharply knife pulled petals and small gold centres, and their stems and long leaves run down past her waist in strong green diagonals. This is the busiest passage in the picture and the only place where drawing takes over from texture.

At the left of the canvas stands a heavy earthenware jar, wide bellied and dark, painted in umber and burnt sienna with a broad flat rim, and out of it rise two enormous banana leaves in pale green with their parallel veins ruled in. Those leaves lean the same way the lilies do, so the two plant forms answer one another across the figure and frame her between them.

The scheme runs on three notes only, white, gold and brown, with green admitted twice. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near two women in yellow and blue ao dai under a pink umbrella and a woman in sage ao dai seated beside a vase of white flowers.