Daenerys Targaryen Beneath Dragons in the Clouds — Print & Oil Painting

The viewpoint has been dropped below the waist and tilted up, which removes the horizon completely. There is no ground anywhere in this picture: the figure is seen against nothing but white cumulus and a hard white sun burning in the upper right, and the whole canvas sits several stops brighter than anything else in the collection.

Dragons circle in that brightness at three different depths. The nearest is a rust-red pair of wings crossing the upper left with the body foreshortened almost to nothing; a second passes behind her right shoulder; a third, much paler, drifts at the lower left with a blue-clad figure and the tip of a spear beneath it. All of them are softened by cloud, and none is fully drawn.

She stands with both arms open and the palms turned up, the head lifted and turned to the left, hair falling to the hip. The dress is a strong turquoise over a black underlayer, with a broad belt of gold scrollwork at the waist and studded leather bracers on both forearms, and it is the only strong colour anywhere in the frame.

Her family came out of Valyria, where the ruling houses kept dragons and rode them, and were the one line to survive the destruction of that empire. A composition that puts her under three of them in open sky is painting the inheritance rather than the woman. In our Game of Thrones collection, beside the portrait beneath flying dragons in its red panel.