Eastern Night, 1937 (oil on canvas)

At the outset of his career in 1901, Kelly moved to Paris where he befriended Sargent and Sickert, and met Monet. After seven years and a disastrous love affair with a showgirl form Montmartre, he sailed six thousand miles way to forget her, to Burma in 1908 at the suggestion of his friend the novelist Somerset Maugham, who lent him £50 to do it. There he fell in love anew, but this time with an ideal of Eastern beauty, exotic and mysterious, that he pursued for the rest of his career, returning to Burma several times. He set up his headquarters in the house of the District judge, and travelled up and down the Irrawaddy by steamer and rode inland by pony. Kelly made a good number of small plein air landscape sketches during his six month stay in Burma but larger landscapes on canvas are rare. This one remained in Kelly's studio, the contents of which were left in Kelly's will to his assistant the painter John Napper. Of Kelly's working method Napper recalled: 'His slow painstaking methods made sure that there was always work in hand in the studio: portraits, landscapes, Burmese dancers, still-lives, started sometimes many years previously, would be got out, washed down, worked on, put away, and so on.' (Derek Hudson, For Love of Painting: The Life of Sir Gerald Kelly, 1975, p. 59). We are told that this is the site of Mya Tha Lun Pagoda, in Magway, Myanmar, which is visible from the Irrawaddy River.