Description
This one is worth flagging before anything else: it is not an oil painting. It is a drawing, pen and ink with watercolour wash on cream paper, and it behaves entirely differently from the canvases around it in the catalogue.
A large tree fills the centre. Its trunk is washed in brown, and its canopy is built from hundreds of small looping pen outlines filled in with blue, yellow and green wash, so the foliage reads as line first and colour second. Two figures stand at the left, drawn in pen alone, one in a long coat; a third small figure stands at the foot of the trunk. Low scrub and rocks behind are laid in with brown and green wash, and a yellow band of ground runs across the foreground with a soft brown wash at the lower left.
Much of the sheet is left untouched, and that bare cream paper is doing the work that white paint would do in an oil. Enlarged, the pen line is the whole pleasure of it.



