Jon Snow Stands With Ghost Amid Fire and Sparks — Print & Oil Painting

Several hundred embers have been flicked across the upper half of the canvas, orange and yellow, none of them larger than a grain of rice, all drifting up and to the left from a fire burning at the right edge. They were the last thing applied and they carry the atmosphere of the whole picture: the air here is full of something that is still hot.

The canvas divides by temperature rather than by shape. From the centre rightwards there is ochre smoke and open flame; to the left there is a cold grey vapour with no detail in it at all. The figure stands on the seam between the two, lit warm down one side and left almost unmodelled on the other, which is a harder thing to paint than it looks.

The sword supplies the only straight line available. Raised in the right hand with the blade vertical and edge on, it takes a long unbroken highlight from the fire behind and runs from the fist nearly to the top of the frame. Nothing else in the picture is rigid: a shaggy fur mantle across both shoulders, quilted leather beneath it, a belt, a beard.

Ghost does all the reacting. He comes in low at the bottom left with the jaws open and the teeth bared, one red eye visible, the white of his head the palest thing on the canvas, while the man above him looks off to the left with his mouth closed and his weight settled. A small cursive signature has been left in the bottom right corner.

The men who hold the Wall burn their dead, because a body left out in that country does not reliably stay a body. Fire in a picture of the Night's Watch is never only weather. From our Game of Thrones collection, next to the same two standing together in the mist, which paints the pair with the fire taken out.