Ned Stark Stands Firm in the Smoky Mist — Print & Oil Painting

One pigment appears to have been allowed and then diluted. Umber runs the whole canvas, from a bleached sand in the fog to a near black in the cloak, with no blue, no red and no green admitted anywhere, so the picture works entirely on value. It has the quality of an oil sketch made to settle the tones before the colour arrives.

The pose is a wedge. Both hands are stacked on the pommel of a sword whose point is in the ground, the arms make two sides of a triangle, the cloak spreads to complete it, and the whole figure sits dead centre with the mass low. It is the most stable arrangement available, and the artist has used it deliberately against everything moving around it.

The head breaks that stability. It is turned sharply to his left, chin up, the mouth open and the throat tensed: he is calling to somebody outside the frame, and the sound is the only thing in the picture that has any speed in it. The beard and the loose hair take the single brightest touch of light on the canvas.

Nothing behind him is a place. Two or three dark masses that might be thorn or scrub float in the haze at either side, the ground fades out before it reaches the bottom edge, and there is no horizon at all. From our Game of Thrones collection, where the same man overlooking Winterfell at dusk gives him a landscape to stand in.