In Rooster and Hen Lee Man Fong presents with elegant restraint a simple, timeless pairing: a proud rooster and a companion hen, depicted with refined observation and painterly subtlety. Executed in 1947, this work belongs to a formative period when the artist was locating his own visual language — one at once rooted in Chinese brush-painting sensitivities and attuned to Western oil-painting technique. The narrow vertical format emphasises the upright cadence of the rooster's stance, while the soft tonalities of the background allow the white, red and earth-toned feathers to assert rich presence without theatricality.

The birds are not isolated in an empty field but exist within a quietly resonant zone: grass, a hint of bamboo or reed, a backdrop of mist-toned space. The brush-marks suggest texture — the soft volume of the hen's body, the more angular projection of the rooster's comb and tail-plumes — yet the rendering retains an economy of means, a delicacy of line that hints at Chinese painting traditions. One senses both the creature's physical reality and its symbolic weight: the rooster's vigilance, the hen’s calm companionship. Together they evoke ideas of vigilance and nurture, of dawn's awakening and the continuity of life.

This work, exhibited in The Hague in about 1950, indicates the artist's early international presence and his engagement with a European art world while maintaining a distinctive 'south-east Asian' sensibility. The synthesis of East and West, realism and suggestion, forms a hallmark of Lee Man Fong’s mature practice; here, in an early example, we glimpse the emerging harmony of that synthesis.

As a painting of animals — less often discussed than his human subjects or landscapes — Rooster and Hen offers a quietly persuasive expression of Lee's empathy with the natural world and his belief that the everyday may reveal deeper truths. For the discerning collector it stands as a significant early example of his animal-subject work, executed with subtle mastery and an assured voice.