Jon Snow Gazes Into the Icy Wind — Print & Oil Painting

The whole surface has been dragged. Long horizontal streaks of dry pigment run across the background, across the fur, across the jaw and even over the cheek, so that the painting reads as one continuous weather system with a head sitting inside it. Snow, brushmark and canvas grain are deliberately impossible to tell apart.

Colour has been cut back to a single family. Everything from the darkest fold of the cloak to the palest patch of sky behind him is some version of the same slate blue, warmed very slightly on the forehead and the nose and cooled everywhere else. Two or three flecks of near white in the fur are the only pure notes allowed.

The head is turned three quarters to the right and the eyes are lowered, almost closed, rather than lifted into the weather. That small choice changes the picture completely: he is not facing anything, he is enduring it, and the mouth set under the dark beard has the flatness of somebody who has stopped expecting the wind to stop.

The bastard son of Winterfell took the black and spent his service in the coldest posting the Seven Kingdoms have, and portraits of him tend to be portraits of temperature. This one commits to that harder than most. Part of our Game of Thrones collection, alongside the study of him holding a pale flower in the snowfall.