Washerwoman Under The Banana Trees - Circa 1930 - M. Thu - Oil On Canvas - Vietnam - Hanoi

"The washerwoman under the banana trees". Mai Thu - Vietnam - Indochina Oil on canvas signed, 85 x 65.5 cm

It’s been almost fourteen years now that we follow this painter attentively, very exactly since 2011 when we acquired in a house of sale which made Vietnamese artists one of its specialties a canvas signed M.Thu, attributed then to Mai Trung Thu (Canvas shown below) in his youth production before leaving for France in 1943. This attribution being challenged by his family, a new attribution to a certain Nguyen Mai Thu, an attribution very questionable, not to say fanciful because no one knows the slightest biographical element of this character and the signature of his paintings never included the patronymic Nguyen or the initial N. This name of Nguyen Mai Thu appeared from nowhere for the first time on sale in 2017 and It is now easy to find a new canvas bearing this signature. In any case, the very European style of these paintings suggests that he was trained by French teachers, probably at the School of Fine Arts in Hanoi, given the location of his landscapes.
His production, concerning only oils on canvas is mostly located in Tonkin and sometimes dated, between 1933 and 1950.
Other purchases followed in different sales rooms in Paris or the provinces, with sometimes farfetched attributions such as «signature Thai not identified».
Disclaimer of the auction houses, it must be recognized that at the time very few works of this artist had circulated, and the rare works signed M.Thu passed under the hammer were attributed to Mai Trung Thu or the school of Hanoi.
We now know that his name is Mai Thu and that he signed in turn "THU", "mai thu", in Chinese characters whose transcription pinyin is Méi Qiū (photo attached) and especially "M.Thu".