Jon Snow Stands With Ghost in the Mist — Print & Oil Painting

Look at the ground before anything else. The bottom fifth of the canvas is a bed of wet grey stones, each one drawn separately with a lit upper edge and a dark underside, and it is the only part of the picture given hard information. Everything above it has been allowed to dissolve.

What it dissolves into is a single blue-green. Cliff, smoke, sky and distance are the same mixture at slightly different values, with no horizon and no object in the middle ground that can be named. One small patch of pale blue light burns near the lower right corner, cool and unexplained, and it is the only colour that departs from the scheme.

He stands almost centre, weight even on both feet, a long sword held down and away from the right hand so that the blade crosses the frame diagonally towards the animal. The costume is dark teal leather over a mail collar, a black fur mantle pushed back off the chest, a belt carrying a second scabbard at the hip. Nothing about the pose is dramatic. The sword is simply out.

The wolf is the brightest object in the composition, painted as one soft mass of cream and pale grey with only a muzzle, an eye and the fold of an ear found inside it. His shoulder reaches the man's waist, which is the scale these animals are given in the story and still looks wrong on a canvas.

The blade this character carries had belonged to another house for five centuries before it came to him, and the old commander who handed it over had the pommel recut first, a bear taken off and a pale stone wolf with garnet chips for eyes put on in its place. Part of our Game of Thrones collection, beside the pair standing amid fire and sparks.