Jaime Lannister Kneels Before the City Walls — Print & Oil Painting

Not one cool colour has been allowed in. Brick red, rose, ochre, cream and gold cover the entire surface, the sky included, and even the shadows inside the armour have been warmed with brown rather than cooled with blue. A small wedge of pale cloud in the upper left corner is the single exception on the canvas.

Behind him a city has been laid in with soft washes and deliberately left short of focus: crenellated curtain walls, square towers with pale conical caps, a long arcaded gallery running out to the left edge, and past all of it a haze the colour of a warm evening. It is scenery rather than architecture, and it has been given no hard edge anywhere that might compete with the figure.

He is down on one knee at the right, and the sword makes the strongest line in the frame. Gripped in both gauntlets at the centre of the picture, the blade rises across the whole width to the upper left corner in one long diagonal, and his head is turned down along it. The gilt is engraved at every plate, the pauldron scalloped, the vambrace scrolled, and a white cloak falls from the shoulder and pools into a mass of cloth across the bottom of the frame.

Light comes from the left and does its real work on the metal: a hard rim down the front of the greave, a soft red bounce from the walls into the shadowed side of the breastplate, one bright point on a knuckle. The face is broad and lightly lined, and the expression it carries is tiredness rather than triumph.

White is the colour of the order he belongs to, and he was fifteen when he was given that cloak, the youngest man ever raised to it. The painting spends more attention on the cloth than on anything except the gold. From our Game of Thrones collection, opposite the same suit of gold slumped on the Iron Throne.