Focus | Aguttes

A new energy flowed through his painting, and the canvas La Lecture fully illustrates this transition to the artist's last period of maturity. In it, Lê Phổ develops an elaborate and complex composition, blending portraiture, still life and landscape.

While renewing his technique, he remains faithful to his favorite themes. The "painter of women" articulates the scene around a central bouquet, surrounded by three female figures and a young boy. Reading, learned at home, becomes the symbol of an idealized nostalgia and tenderness for his Vietnamese childhood.

The still life, which has been part of the hierarchy of genres since the 17th century and became increasingly important in his work from the 1960s onwards, takes center stage in a lush floral composition of poppy flowers, tulips, daisies and lily-of-the-valley branches. It is accompanied, on the right, by a basin containing lemons. The slender, elegant female figures are reminiscent of Mannerist models from the Italian Renaissance.

Dressed in traditional Vietnamese áo dài, they embody an ideal of grace and beauty. Each is absorbed in a distinct activity (reading, prayer or contemplation), underscoring Lê Phổ's attention to the individualization of his figures. The entire scene is set in a light-filled interior, opening onto a blue sky clouds delicately shaded in white and gray.

Mastering the representation of detail, the artist modernizes traditional pictorial genres with an innovative composition, whose framing recalls the works of Chagall. The large format reinforces the exceptional character of this piece, which remains a rarity in the artist's prolific career: in the last twelve years, only a dozen canvases of this scale have been auctioned. auctioned. Its size, the richness of the palette, the precision of the brushwork and the balance of the composition lend the work an atmosphere both calm and poetic, making it a major example of the Findlay period, if not of Lê Phổ's entire output.