Snow Blankets the Castle of Winterfell — Print & Oil Painting

The snow has barely been painted at all. It is the white of the support, left bare and worked around, and the drifts take their form from the blue-grey washes laid beside them rather than from anything applied on top. Watercolour is being used the way watercolour is supposed to be used, and the whole image runs on dilution.

The castle rises through the middle of the frame in stages: a round keep with a conical cap at the top, a curtain wall with square merlons below it, a cluster of steep-roofed halls stepping down to the left, and on the right a heavy stone gatehouse carrying a timber gallery bracketed out from its face. Icicles hang from every ledge as short vertical strokes.

A bridge of four arches crosses the foreground and is the best passage in the picture. Its parapet is a single dragged line, its arches are each one wash left to bleed at the bottom, and along the top of it a dozen dark figures the size of a comma are walking towards the gate. Two small orange-red marks near a roof are the only warm colour anywhere, and birds have been flicked into the sky as bent dashes.

The architecture leans on spires and gables more than the books ask for. The castle on the page is a low, thick, round-towered sprawl inside two granite walls with a moat between them, the outer eighty feet high and the inner more than a hundred, and legend hands the whole thing to a builder eight thousand years dead. What survives the translation is the part that matters: a great mass of stone with weather sitting on it. From our Game of Thrones collection, beside the figure who stands looking at this castle from a hill at dusk.