Nguyen Gia Tri was born in 1908 in the Ha Dong district of Ha Tay province in North Vietnam. As a student at the L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de L'Indochina in the 1930s, he was a leading force in turning lacquer painting from a decorative handicraft to a means of artistic expression. Working with other craftsmen, Tri combined foreign engraving and inlaying methods and the basic principles of European painting with new lacquer techniques for preparing, polishing and colouration. Faced with a very limited range of colours - transparent brown, black and a few reds - Tri and others produced new colours from various raw materials like crushed or inlaid eggshells to create pure and bluish white. A wider palate, subtle shading, and greater pictorial depth allowed lacquer painters to explore a wider range of subject matter and feeling.

Tri's experiments with lacquer led him to create remarkable works with the medium in the early 1940s, which include By the Side of Restored Sword Lake and Spring Garden. The paintings characteristically shine with a dazzling golden colour that creates a sense of balance and uniformity, highlighting the outlines of human bodies and objects. The surfaces of his paintings are even, flat and shiny like the effect of calm water. The different elements in his pictures come together to produce a contrast of exuberance and elegance. Tri is highly regarded for his folding screens depicting scenes of women and landscape.

In 1989, Tri was officially recognized by the Ministry of Culture and Information as one of the ten painters who made the greatest contributions to the development of Vietnamese modern art.

Nguyen Gia Tri's main contribution to modern Vietnamese art was his original idea of handling traditional craft materials and his success in elevating the status of lacquer painting to that of fine art. Having graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine in 1936, his style is a combination of Western technique with Oriental aestheticism. The artist's main concern was to search for a nationalistic culture outside of the French school. The artist did not restrict himself exclusively to the medium of oil on canvas and in 1936 he painted oil on silk for his graduation piece. He then produced lacquer work, which would make him an internationally known artist. Equally skilled in both oil and lacquer painting, his favorite subject is the rustic Vietnamese landscape.

This present lot was executed around 1941, a time when Nguyen Gia Tri was taken by the French government to a remote area where the minorities or 'Muong' people lived. He stayed there under house arrest during the anti-French movement with ample time to take in his surroundings. The landscape in this painting probably depicts the scenery where he was held with the typical Vietnamese straw huts in the foreground, the graduated farming land on the left and plenty of wild vegetation growing all around. Typical of Tri's lacquer works, he depicts golden bamboo trees with reddish leaves and green banana trees with the use of green, blue and white eggshells to further define his subjects. The overall effect of the painting is rich and undulating, gold shimmers throughout, bringing rhythm and harmony to the painting. With this traditional and painstaking technique, Gia's lacquer work is certainly Vietnamese landscape and culture at its best.