Bellatrix Lestrange Reaching Through Green Mist — Print & Oil Painting

Green light, and a great deal of it. Vapour fills the entire background and drifts across the figure herself, lit from behind so that it glows jade at the edges and goes almost grey where it thickens. The image has been graded so far towards that one hue that the skin reads cool and the blacks read green.

The gesture is the composition. Her right hand comes straight out of the picture towards the viewer, fingers curled, held so close that it is larger than her head and slightly soft at the edges. Behind it the wand is raised in the other hand, small and pale, held loosely between two fingers as though it were of no importance whatsoever.

The costume follows the character as the films settled her: a black corseted gown laced down the front, sheer black sleeves off the shoulder, dark rings, a band at the throat, heavy dark lipstick. The hair is the signature, an enormous mass of loose brown curls with no attempt at order in it.

The handling is photographic rather than painterly: continuous tone, real depth of field, a shallow plane of focus that holds the face and lets everything else soften. It reads as a photograph of a person rather than as an invention, which sets it apart from the painted work around it. From our Harry Potter collection, alongside the study of the Dark Lord's wand and the burning castle, the two things this character is finally bound to.