Tô Ngọc Vân

Biography

The “Apsara” stamp of 1931 grew out of travel sketches. Tô Ngọc Vân visited the temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia, and the celestial dancer from their walls became the main image of an Indochina postage issue.

It is the only stamp he made, and one of the few drawn by a Vietnamese artist in the colonial period.

The date of his birth is uncertain. It is most often given as 15 December 1906, while some documents say 1908. He grew up in Hanoi, and the family’s ancestral village, Xuân Cầu, is in Hưng Yên province. The family was poor. He left secondary school in his third year because he had decided to become an artist. In 1926 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi, one of the students of its first generation. The year of his graduation is given differently: by some accounts he finished in 1928, by others in 1931. Afterwards he taught drawing at the Bưởi school. His work was shown at exhibitions in Paris in 1931 and 1932 and won awards there. From 1935 to 1939 he taught at a secondary school in Phnom Penh, then returned to Hanoi and until 1945 taught composition at the same École des Beaux-Arts. In those years he travelled widely and painted the cities of Indochina: Bangkok, Huế, Phnom Penh. For the magazines of the literary group Tự Lực văn đoàn (“Self-Strengthening literary group”) he drew cartoons on current events, social issues and everyday life. He contributed to the newspapers Phong Hóa, Ngày Nay and Thanh Nghị, and wrote articles about painting.

He is usually called a pioneer of oil painting in Vietnam. He worked in oil and watercolour, and the best-known pictures of the years before 1945 are painted in soft pastel tones: “Boat on the Hương River” (1935), “Girl by the Lily” (1943), “Two Girls and a Baby” (1944). Among them is also “The Girl by the Lotus” (1944). Among those regarded as the leading Vietnamese painters of the twentieth century, he is ranked alongside Nguyễn Gia Trí, Nguyễn Tường Lân and Trần Văn Cẩn. He himself recalled that as a student he had dreamed of a Vietnamese painting with a national character, one that could answer the pressure of French art.

After the August Revolution of 1945 he took part in the war of resistance against the French. From 1950 he headed the Việt Bắc Art School, which had been moved into the jungle of the northern zone. From this time there remain hundreds of wartime sketches and pictures such as “Resting on the Hill” (1948) and “Two Soldiers” (1949). Later he showed in his work how Vietnamese society was changing; in 1954 came “Going to Evening Classes” and “Three Tai Girls”.

Tô Ngọc Vân died on 17 June 1954 near the Lũng Lô pass, not far from the battlefield at Điện Biên Phủ. He was wounded in a French air raid on Highway 37, and he died of that wound. He is buried in Hanoi at the Mai Dịch cemetery. In November 1954, at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in Hanoi, he was awarded the first prize posthumously, and in 1996 he became one of the first recipients of the Ho Chi Minh Prize. His works are held in the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts. Streets in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City bear his name, as does a crater on Mercury.