Considered the first female artist of modern Vietnamese art, Le Thi Luu is one of the four overseas masters alongside Le Pho, Vu Cao Dam, and Mai Trung Thu.

Born in 1911 to an intellectual family, Le Thi Luu was raised with a traditional code of ethics combining Vietnamese culture and Confucianism, although her father received education in the French colonial system. She kept her hair long and original, had her teeth lacquered, and wore traditional clothing. As a kid, she followed her parents traveling through different regions in Tonkin. The family moved to Hanoi when she turned 14 years old. In 1927, she entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, which was a rare case for female students in Vietnam and graduated as valedictorian. Luu briefly taught at the Gia Dinh Fine Art School in Saigon before she departed for France in 1940 with her husband, Ngo The Tan. After several excursions due to her husband’s position, Le Thi Luu finally settled down in Paris in 1948 and started to paint more consistently.

Le Thi Luu’s paintings are soft and gentle, often depicting women and children, some of which bring out the dreamy characters evoked in Vietnamese poetry. She first made mostly oil paintings and switched to silk painting towards the later period of her career. As she explored her own technique of painting on silk, she made several experiments by applying oil, one of which is now in the collection of the Ho Chi Minh Museum of Fine Art.