Woman Resting in a Hammock With Her Conical Hat — Print & Oil Painting

A single slow gradient makes up the background and it does more work than any object present. It runs from hot yellow green at the centre out to deep teal at the corners with no mark visible anywhere in the transition, and a cool blue grey plane cuts across the lower third as a floor. The effect is of a stage lit from behind rather than of a place.

Across that space a string hammock is slung from edge to edge, its net rendered knot by knot in fine pale line and sagging under what it carries. A woman lies along it on her side, cheek resting on her stacked hands, eyes closed, one knee drawn a little forward. Her long sleeved top is a soft fawn, a red sash shows at the waist, and a dark red band holds her hair.

Her black skirt is the largest dark shape on the canvas. It hangs below the hammock in a broad triangular sweep, smooth and unbroken, its point reaching almost to the floor line. Because everything else is light and airy, that black wedge anchors the design and stops it drifting off.

Two smaller elements finish the arrangement. In the upper left corner a branch enters the frame with dark leaves and a few small pale blossoms, and down on the ground at the right a conical hat lies upturned beside a loose bundle of green stalks. Between them they mark the two corners the hammock does not reach.

Everything is painted with a smooth airless finish and no brushwork is visible anywhere, which suits the subject exactly: this is a picture about the middle of a hot afternoon. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a woman in white ao dai sitting barefoot on a misty lotus dock and a woman in lavender ao dai asleep beside a vase of pink lotus.