Robb Stark Gazes Into the Distance — Print & Oil Painting

One flat field of slate blue, and one head in front of it. The ground carries no incident anywhere, no gradient worth the name, no suggestion of a room or a sky, so the entire picture rests on how well the face has been made. It is an old-fashioned decision and a confident one.

The handling is soft to the point of showing no brushmark at all. Skin, shadow and the edge of the jaw are blended without a visible stroke, closer to pastel than to oil, and the one place the method changes is the hair: dark curls built up as a mass and then drawn back over with individual pale strands, dozens of them, each lit along its length.

Below that, a heavy fur mantle takes the whole lower left of the canvas and has been worked almost to black, with a small dull metal clasp at the shoulder as the only hard object in the frame. It is painted as weight. The head above it sits forward of the shoulders, three quarters to the right, the chin slightly raised.

The face carries a thin moustache, a few days of stubble along the jaw, and a warm light arriving from the right that leaves the far cheek in shadow. A few pale scratched lines cross the forehead where an earlier drawing shows through the paint. The eyes are the point: open, level, and fixed past the edge of the picture on something the viewer is not allowed to see.

He never lost a battle and lost everything regardless, which is this character in eight words. A portrait that gives him no crown, no armour and no army is closer to the truth of him than one that does. Part of our Game of Thrones collection, near his sister wrapped in fur amid the snow and their father's face framed by autumn leaves.