Vietnamese Oil Paintings

Vietnam is a country of narrow streets and wide horizons, and this collection holds both. Painted by hand in oils, one canvas at a time, it gathers the scenes people actually remember from the country: the lantern glow of a Tet night in Hoi An, the crowded stalls of Cho Lon market, a morning in the old quarter of Hanoi, a water buffalo standing still in a flooded field.

What is in this collection

Around three hundred and seventy paintings, grouped loosely into four kinds of subject. City scenes take in Hanoi, Saigon and Hue: shophouse facades, motorbike traffic caught in warm light, market days that fill the whole canvas. Landscapes run from the terraced valleys of the north to mountain villages in spring and river deltas at dusk. Country life covers rice fields, fishing boats, buffalo and the quiet work of a day. And a smaller historical group reaches further back, to bronze age village scenes and Confucian scholars at their studies.

The palette across the collection leans warm. Vietnamese light is strong and low for much of the year, and the paintings are made to carry that into a room rather than flatten it.

How each painting is made

Nothing here is a print. Each canvas is painted in oils after you order it, by an artist working from the reference image you see on the page. That is why the lead time is measured in weeks rather than days, and why two copies of the same subject are never quite identical.

You choose the dimensions rather than picking from a fixed list, so a painting can be sized to the wall it is going on. Three finishes are available: Simple for a clean, even surface, Texture for visible brushwork and relief, and Museum for the heaviest impasto and the closest thing to a gallery original.

Choosing one for a room

A single large canvas usually does more for a wall than several small ones. For a living room, a landscape wider than it is tall sits well above a sofa or a sideboard. For a hallway or a stairwell, an upright street scene holds attention at close range, where you pass within a metre of it. Restaurants and hotels tend toward the market and street subjects, which carry noise and warmth; a bedroom or a treatment room is usually better served by the quieter valleys and river scenes.

If you are unsure, tell us where the painting will hang and roughly how much wall you have. We will suggest a proportion that suits it.

Something not in the collection

If you have a photograph of Vietnam of your own - a street you lived on, a view from a trip, a family house - it can be painted the same way. Send it to us and an artist will look at it before anything is agreed.

Shipping is free worldwide, and every painting is packed for the journey.