Tyrion Lannister Portrait in Blue Light — Print & Oil Painting

The background is six brushloads and no more. Slate blue and pale grey have been dragged diagonally across the panel in wide flat strokes, crossing behind the head at the top and opening into a lighter wedge on the left, and the artist has not gone back into any of them. It is a backdrop, frankly declared as one.

Across the whole surface, the face included, lies a fine regular dot pattern of the kind a printed screen leaves behind. It sits on the skin, in the beard and over the collar, and it gives the image the slightly mechanical texture of something reproduced rather than made. The source is a small one, and the piece holds together better at modest sizes than at large.

The head is close to square with the viewer and lifted very slightly. Fair curling hair long enough to fall past the ear and pushed back off a high forehead, a full brown beard with grey working through it, and a pair of grey-blue eyes set level and completely undramatic. A dark garment closes at the throat with a narrow band of lighter blue, and that is the entire costume.

On the page this character is described very differently: one eye green and one black, hair so fair it reads as white, a face the writing is repeatedly unkind about. The portrait follows the screen version instead, and by doing so it makes a straightforward and sympathetic head study out of somebody the books go out of their way to make hard to look at. Part of our Game of Thrones collection, near his brother in gilded armour before the city walls.