Thành Lễ Workshop, Bronze Bust of a Young Woman Wearing the Khăn Vấn, Vietnam, circa 1950s–60s

THÀNH LỄ WORKSHOP (Thủ Dầu Một and Saigon, active from 1940), the atelier of NGUYỄN THÀNH LỄ (Vietnamese, 1919–2003)

Bust of a Young Woman Wearing the Khăn Vấn

Southern Vietnam, mid-twentieth century (circa 1950s–1960s)

Medium: Cast bronze, the hair and headdress chased with incised lines and punched texturing, under a glossy black surface, probably lacquer, which has worn through in places to the golden and reddish-brown metal beneath. Fixed by a threaded rod, iron nut, and brass hexagonal collar to a square black-painted wooden plinth with a molded upper edge.

Dimensions: 11 inch: overall height

Marks: An impressed circular seal mark at the nape of the neck. Its characters are softened by the black finish and have not yet been read.

Condition: Good. The surface is bright and largely intact, with scattered fine scratches and light rubbing throughout, heaviest across the coiled hair at the back of the head, where patches of bare metal show through. A few pinpoint chips to the finish, including one on the headdress behind the left ear and one at the lower right edge of the back. No cracks, breaks, or restorations evident. The plinth with scuffs, minor paint losses, and light surface grime; verdigris to the brass collar and rust to the iron nut.

A young woman is shown at the scale of a cabinet portrait, her head held level and her gaze lowered. The face is modeled in smooth, continuous planes and burnished to a high shine, with arched brows over downcast, almond-shaped eyes, incised lids, a short broad nose, and a closed mouth that turns up very slightly at the corners. A drop earring hangs from each lobe. Above the brow the hair is swept back in incised waves, parted to one side, and taken up into the khăn vấn, the Vietnamese turban in which a woman's long hair is wrapped with a band of cloth and wound around the head. The workshop rendered the cloth with a close punched ground that imitates its weave, and engraved the hair coiled within it in spiraling strokes across the crown, so that the face is framed on every side by worked surface. Below, the neck ends in a sweeping, collar-like truncation, and the head rises from its plinth on a threaded mount.

Nguyễn Thành Lễ was born at Long Xuyên, in the Mekong Delta, in 1919, and trained at the school of applied arts at Thủ Dầu Một, north of Saigon. In 1940 he and his former classmate Trương Văn Thanh (1918–1992) founded Thanh & Lễ at Thủ Dầu Một, making lacquer, inlaid work, and carved wood for showrooms in central Saigon, among them premises on the rue Catinat. When the partners later separated, Lễ kept the Thủ Dầu Một works and traded as Thành Lễ, a house the Saigon press came to name among the leading fine-crafts makers of the South. Beside its lacquer panels and furniture, the firm sold cast bronze heads of young women in regional dress, catalogued in the trade today as Saigonese, Laotian, and Tonkinese types, among others. Most were finished in black and mounted on black plinths, and most carry a seal or an inscription in Chinese characters at the nape of the neck.

The bronzes were in circulation by the early 1950s. One of a pair offered in the French trade retains a brass plaque engraved “March 17, 1953, Tan-Son-Nhut,” after the airfield outside Saigon, and many of the busts now in American collections are understood to have come home with servicemen and civilians posted to the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Because they were made in numbers from shared models, they are properly judged as workshop pieces, on the crispness of their chasing and the state of their surfaces, and this example holds up well on both counts. The turbaned northern model also gives the chaser more to do than the workshop's other heads, and the contrast here between the burnished face and the patient punchwork of the cloth is what rewards a close look.