Rating and value of watercolors, drawings and paintings by Le Pho

If you own a work by Le Pho or after the artist, and would like to know its value, our state-approved experts and auctioneers will offer you their appraisal services.

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Rating and value of the artist Le Pho  

The artist Le Pho leaves behind a distinctive body of work, composed mainly of drawings and paintings. He is French-Vietnamese. Now, prices for his works are rising under auctioneers' gavels.

The price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €50 to €1,749,280, a significant gap but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to Le Pho's works. He is especially prized by buyers from Hong Kong, Vietnam and France.

In 2022, an oil on canvas entitled Figure in a Garden sold for €1,749,280, while it was estimated at between €241,280 and €361,920. Its value has exploded in recent years.

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Style and technique by artist Le Pho   

At Le Pho, painting becomes a space for reconciling Vietnamese tradition and Western influences, where soft lines unite with vaporous matter.

While his early works follow in the footsteps of Asian painted scrolls, with precise drawing and colors delicately laid on silk, his style evolves towards a freer approach, influenced by Impressionism and French decorative art.

Here, light not only sculpts shapes, it brushes against them, playing on transparencies and superimposed glazes that lend figures an ethereal presence.

Color, often reduced to pastel harmonies, is never plastered over but diffuses an impression of softness, enveloping the scene in an atmosphere of reverie.

In this balance between refinement and fluidity, Le Pho develops a painting where Asian memory intertwines with a Western sensibility, making each composition a suspended evocation between the real and the imaginary.

Le Pho's life

Le Pho is a Vietnamese painter born in 1907 into a family of mandarins, he is the son of the last viceroy of Tonkin. He grew up in northern Vietnam and, like Cao Dam Vu, studied at the Indochina School of Fine Arts in Hanoi. His teacher, like many other painters of his generation in Vietnam, was Victor Tardieu. He also studied with Joseph Inguimberty.

During a trip to Europe, he was fascinated by religious art and Renaissance paintings, which he studied in Italy, France and Belgium.

Returning to Vietnam in 1933, he carried out commissions for Emperor Bao Dai. In 1937, he directed the Indochinese section of the Exposition Internationale.

His son, Pierre Le Lan, was also a painter and draughtsman.

Le Pho died in 2001 in Paris, aged 94. 

Focus on Women in the Garden, Le Pho

In Women in the Garden, Le Pho transposes onto silk an idealized vision of the world where nature and the female figure merge in delicate harmony.

While the artist draws on the Vietnamese pictorial tradition, this work bears witness to his assimilation of Impressionist principles: here, light is not a simple element of enhancement, but a vector of emotion that envelops the scene in a diaphanous veil.

The supple composition plays on undulating lines that guide the eye smoothly, while the pictorial material, worked in successive glazes, accentuates the effect of depth and transparency.

Instead of the rigor of the drawing, a more intuitive approach is adopted, where color, in its subtle modulations, infuses the image with a feeling of suspended tranquillity.

In this balance between tradition and modernity, Women in the Garden illustrates the quest for a pictorial language in which Asian memory dialogues with Western sensibility, in a synthesis imbued with refinement and poetry.

Le Pho's stylistic influences

In his works, Le Pho weaves a subtle relationship between traditional Vietnamese iconography and the Western stylistic influences he encountered during his stay in France.

If, in his early compositions, the artist immersed himself in the techniques of the Hanoi School of Fine Arts, he was soon influenced by Fauvism and Impressionism, particularly by the way these movements exploited color to express emotions rather than simply imitate nature.

The influence of decorative art, too, is felt in the elegance of its lines and the search for simplified forms, close to art nouveau.

However, it is in his encounter with the French masters of figurative painting that Le Pho finds a new dimension: the light, fluid atmosphere, the use of glazes and the transparency of color testify to an assimilation of Impressionist processes, while retaining a touch of Asian poetry.

This hybridization enables the artist to create a singular universe, where each work becomes the reflection of an ongoing dialogue between two cultures.

Today, the artist stands out on the international auction scene and his works have reached record amounts in recent years, such as those by Vu Cao Dam, Nam Son Nguyen and Thuong Lan Nguyen.

Le Pho's legacy on his period

In his works from the 1940s-1950s, Le Pho managed to synthesize the classical and modern influences he had received along the way, while anchoring his work in a search for cultural identity.

Far from confining himself to a simple revival of Vietnamese traditions, the artist redefines the visual language by creating compositions where the softness of the curves and the light of the backgrounds evoke the serenity of Asian landscapes while borrowing from the West the idea of a soothed abstraction.

His mastery of the portrait, the nude and the landscape, treated with great finesse, becomes the foundation of his legacy: an exploration of line and color where each form seeks to express a universal harmony.

Le Pho's legacy thus lies in this ability to combine, without hierarchy, Western and Asian art, in the search for an aesthetic specific to his own vision of the world.

Through his technique, marked by glazes and subtle colors, the artist profoundly influenced subsequent generations of Asian artists, while contributing to the development of a figurative abstraction at the crossroads of traditions.

Le Pho's posterity

In 2023, the retrospective devoted to Le Pho at the Musée Guimet revisited a fundamental aspect of his work, that of the relationship between form and material.

His early works, executed on silk, reveal a measured use of line and glaze, drawing inspiration from both traditional Sino-Vietnamese painting and the rigor of the Japanese schools.

The surface of the canvas, then the very texture of the silk, were then so many substrates where light and color mingled in a subtle dance of reflections and transparencies.

The execution remained marked by an impression of fluidity, a restrained sensuality that had its origins in the ancient practices of Southeast Asia.

In 1962, the exhibition devoted to him at the São Paulo Biennale marked a turning point in his work. There, Le Pho confronts his pictorial vocabulary with the West, modifying the geometry of his compositions, but never abandoning this tactile search for the surface, which becomes both form and substance.

At this point, it is clear that his evolution towards abstraction does not follow a purely optical logic, but rather an intimate understanding of texture and material.

The works of this period, sometimes close to the experiments of Art Informel, transform the "pictorial fact" into a living, vibrant material, nourished by the experience of an increasingly dematerialized world.

There, in an almost kinetic dynamic, the canvas becomes charged with vibrations, superimpositions that seem to destabilize space.

In this approach, the very notion of outline almost completely disappears, giving way to an ensemble where light and matter, all at once, take shape in the unity of a continuous fabric.

The duality of figure and ground, so important at the start of his career, dissolves to make way for a new conception, where the surface itself becomes the subject.

Recognizing the artist's signature

The Pho signs his works most of the time, in French and Chinese, and marks his watercolors with a seal. However, it is essential to have your work appraised to be sure of its originality. What's more ; there are naturally many copies.

Knowing the value of a work

If you happen to own a work by or after Le Pho, don't hesitate to request a free appraisal using our form on our website.

A member of our team of experts and certified auctioneers will contact you promptly to provide you with an estimate of the market value of your work, not forgetting to send you ad hoc information about it.

If you wish to sell your work, you will also be accompanied by our specialists in order to benefit from alternatives for selling it at the best possible price, taking into account market inclinations.