No doubt, Le Pho is one of the most important artists in the history of Vietnamese modern art. Upon entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in 1925, he was the first student whose painting technique was ranked five-star on the entrance exam. Throughout the school’s history, there were only three of them, including Le Pho, Nguyen Phan Chanh, and Nguyen Gia Tri.

Known for his prolific painting practice spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s, Le Pho mastered silk painting as soon as he entered I'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de I'lndochine, and after he emigrated to Paris in 1937, he started to work in oil and developed his unique style, reinventing Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting techniques with a soft, delicate brushwork in a vibrant color palette. His subjects are always concerned with elegant Vietnamese ladies, children, and lush landscapes - common themes among his fellow artists from the Indochina art school.

Born in Hanoi in 1907, Le Pho came from a family of elite feudal officials, an educated political class from the fifteenth century - a social system that originated in China. His father was a high-ranking administrative official of the French colonial government. After settling down in Paris, he married Paulette Vaux, a French journalist for Time and Life magazine. Together, they have two sons - Pierre Le-Tan, a well-known illustrator, and Alain Le Kim, who manages his father's estate.

With Mai Trung Thu, Vu Cao Dam, and Le Thi Luu, Le Pho is considered one of the four overseas masters of Vietnamese modern art. This quartet represents the Vietnamese artists who went to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, later emigrated to France, and made a career in the international art scene.

What’s unique about Le Pho is his masterful transformation from long, thin brushes using watercolor on silk to lustrous oil on canvas imbued with Vietnamese characters. Loosely speaking, his paintings fall into three periods. During the 1930s and early 1940s, when he was based in Hanoi, Le Pho made mostly silk paintings featuring calm, stylized female figures with bamboo, birds, and lotus flowers against an idealized version of the Vietnamese landscape. When he went to Paris in the late 1930s, his paintings showed the influences from the Flemish and Italian masters and the French modern artists, such as Pierre Bonnard and Odilon Redon. Then, he started to work in oil, and for a while, he experimented with Christian iconography, such as the mother and child theme. As he gradually developed his style, his paintings would typically portray women engaged in domestic activities or simply sitting in a garden. Towards his later period, his paintings of still lives became increasingly abstract. Throughout his over fifty-year artistic career, Le Pho’s painting language evolved through different periods and remained distinctively his own.