Sansa Stark Wrapped in Fur Amid the Snow — Print & Oil Painting

The support shows through everywhere, and it changes how the picture reads. This one has been painted in oil on a woven canvas, and the weave has been left visible in the thinner passages: the cheek, the temple and the whole black ground carry a fine regular grain, so the surface behaves like cloth with an image sitting in the tooth of it.

The hair is the best passage. Copper and dark auburn are pulled in long wet strokes down both sides of the head, and several loose strands have been blown across the mouth and the near cheek and painted straight over the finished skin while it was still soft. That crossing of the face is the only movement anywhere in the picture.

Behind her there is no depth at all. The ground is a flat black taken right to the edges, and snow has been added at the very end as scattered white dots of varying size, sitting on top of the image rather than in it. Some of them fall across the hair and the shoulder, which puts the weather in front of the sitter.

The colouring is exact for this character. She took her mother's house rather than her father's: auburn hair and blue eyes, the Tully colouring, where her younger sister got the brown hair and grey eyes of a Stark. Part of our Game of Thrones collection, near her sister poised to strike in the ice and the portrait of Robb Stark gazing into the distance.