Two Pads on Turquoise

An intimate study sets two overlapping lily pads against a flat, unmodulated field of turquoise. The leaves are painted naturalistically, their surfaces freckled with rust-brown blemishes and inked along the crimped rim with a fine dark line.

At the lower left a single white bloom opens, its petals crisp against the leaf and its yellow centre the one warm note in a cool composition. The contrast between the observed detail of the foliage and the graphic emptiness of the coloured ground is the whole point of the picture.