Daenerys Targaryen Surrounded by All Three Dragons — Print & Oil Painting

Three heads have been arranged around one, and the arrangement is almost heraldic: one at the upper left, one at the upper right, one at the lower right, each turned inward, each rendered a different colour. The composition works like a triptych folded around a central panel, and the fourth corner is left to fire.

The colours are the interesting part. The head at the left is dark red over black with a long crest of spines; the one at the right is green with bronze along the jaw; the one below is grey-brown and heavier in the skull, with a yellow eye. Set the three side by side and they answer the descriptions the books give the hatchlings almost exactly.

She is painted in white and cool lilac in the middle of all that heat: a simple draped gown gathered at the shoulder, a dark band at the throat, hair falling in loose pale curls to the waist, one hand lifted to touch the red head at her shoulder. A coil of dark red runs around her left forearm, small enough to be an ornament and shaped like an animal.

Fire fills the bottom left corner and throws embers up across the whole lower half of the canvas. Three dragons together in one frame is a scene these stories had not been able to stage for a century and a half before she managed it. In our Game of Thrones collection, alongside the sunlit room where the hatchlings are still small.