Born in Hanoi in the first decade of the 20th century, To Ngoc Van studied at the College of the Protectorate from 1924 to 1927 and was admitted into the colonial École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine where he subsequently graduated in 1931. The art college trained successive generations of Vietnamese students in the western art tradition, laying the essential groundwork for the development of a distinctive Vietnamese style of modern art. To Ngoc Van was competent across the mediums taught in the college and his works range across silk and lacquer painting as well as oil paintings. His association with the college did not end upon his graduation. The college was taken over by the provisional government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam after the August Revolution of 1945. When the struggle against the French intensified in 1950, the college was moved to Ð?i T?, Thai Nguyen in the Viet Bac Resistance Zone, under the direction of To Ngoc Van.

La maison pres de la riviere (The house near the river) presents a striking impression of a hut in a clearing beside a body of water – a seemingly simple subject, it precisely captures the sense of dawn or dusk in the tropics. A sense of quietude is settling in, underlined by the solitary presence of the hut and its reflection in water.

By contrast, Boats on the Perfume River captures a bustling scene centred on docking boats by a riverside marketplace. The river water shimmers under the strong light of mid-day, the boats are moored close to each other, in a formation that cuts with energy diagonally across the picture plane, lending the scene depicted a sense of pulsating life.

The two paintings, La maison pres de la riviere and Boats on the Perfume Rivere presented in this sale are rare to market early works that illustrate the empathy he has with the lives and sights of his motherland. In his later life, more determined to join the nationalist movement and he eventually joined the Vietminh to take up arms against the French even though he remained grateful of what he learnt from French teachers like Inguimberty. Even though he died far too young during the war in 1954, To Ngoc Van remained a well-respected first-generation Vietnamese artist for being an active participant in the unfolding of 20th century Vietnamese art history and history.

Jean-François Hubert
Senior Expert, Vietnamese Art