Painting By Thai Tuan, Saigon Quarter, 1959.

Oil on hardboard, signed and dated lower left. Signed, dated and titled on the back. Size 58.5 cm x 42 cm. Healthy paint layer. I note very slight losses, two chipped corners and two slight scratches, without gravity. This painting represents an old district of Saigon where refugees from North Vietnam had been housed in 1954, after the Geneva Accords. Thaï Tuân and his painter friends from the "Group of Four" had settled there when they arrived, had worked there. This is where he painted most of his first paintings. Provenance: collection of Henry T. Zaphiratos, famous French writer and director, director in Saigon until 1959 of the company "Thanos-Films". He met the artist at the 1959 exhibition and bought all the available paintings from him on that occasion. A painting by Thaï Tuân, of the same size and from the same period (1954) went on sale at Sotheby's in Hong Kong on October 1, 2018. A great Vietnamese painter, Thaï Tuân created a vibrant body of work, full of nuances. Like his master Modigliani, he was inspired by the long faces and figures in the style of El Greco. Thaï Tuân studied at the Hanoi School of Fine Arts in the 1940s, then exhibited, notably in 1959, in Saigon with the Alliance Française in the salons of the famous Hôtel Continental.