Jon Snow and Ghost Survey Snowy Peaks — Print & Oil Painting

Try counting the strokes in the mountain. There are perhaps thirty, laid in with a broad brush at different pressures, and between them they produce three ridges, a glacier, a shadowed face and a summit lost in cloud. Nothing has been described twice, nothing has been blended, and the range still reads correctly at any distance.

The same economy applies to the figures. The man is a dark upright note on the right of the outcrop, a cloak, a fur mantle, a pale oval for the face and one white spot for the clasp at his throat. The wolf beside him is a single mass of cream with a muzzle and two legs found in it. Neither is more than a few inches tall in the picture.

Colour is restricted to what the weather allows. White, slate, steel and a bleached blue-green cover almost the entire surface, and the only warmth is a band of brown rock under their feet along the very bottom edge. That brown is the sole evidence that anything solid exists in the picture at all.

The country beyond the Wall is exactly this: ice, granite and distance, with the mountains rising into it as the last thing a ranging party sees. From our Game of Thrones collection, and the pair standing before the icy wall shows what they have their backs to.