Daenerys Targaryen Beneath Flying Dragons — Print & Oil Painting

The painting shows its own edges. A deep red rectangle has been laid down inside a cream border, and that border is visibly paint too: the strokes at the top and left are ragged, the corners do not meet, and the red field stops in a slightly wobbly line. The result is a portrait that admits to being an object with a size and a shape.

Inside the red field, two dragons have been painted flat. They are silhouettes rather than animals, dark maroon on scarlet, one large near the top edge with both wings out and one smaller below and to the right, and they carry no modelling at all. They belong to the surface of the picture, the way a device belongs to a banner.

Against those flat marks the figure is fully three-dimensional. The face has been built up in thin warm layers with real weight behind the cheekbone and the jaw, the eyes are wet, the hair is a mass of individually turned curls, and a heavy ochre-gold cape sits over one shoulder above a textured blue bodice. The head is the only rounded thing in the composition.

Red and black are the colours of the house, and its words are three words about fire. Setting a warm-blooded portrait inside a flat heraldic field is a neat way of painting both the woman and the banner at once. In our Game of Thrones collection, next to the portrait before a carved dragon sigil, which does the same trick in stone.