Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone — Print & Oil Painting

A montage in the old poster tradition, built before digital compositing made the job easy: a dozen heads and half figures airbrushed into one another with no hard edge anywhere, so that a jaw dissolves into a shoulder and a shoulder into a sky.

The structure is a cross. Harry sits dead centre and larger than everyone else, round spectacles catching two white highlights, the striped tie the only strong red in the middle of the panel. Above him the castle burns yellow at its windows under a full moon, and a snowy owl comes down across it with her wings fully open, white against the coldest blue in the picture.

Around that centre the cast is stacked by importance rather than by space. A bearded headmaster in a red star-strewn hat and half-moon glasses at the left, a witch in a black pointed hat behind him, a stern grey-haired face below. On the right a fair-haired girl holds up a red book, a pale boy in school black looks out, a dark-haired master waits in profile at the top corner. Down at the lower left, boats full of small figures cross a lake.

The base of the painting is where it turns comic. Three ordinary people stand between two burning lamps: a moustached man, a plump boy in a boater hat giving a thumbs up, a woman in grey holding his arm. They are painted with exactly the same care as the wizards and lit like a family photograph, which is the joke.

What we have here is a photograph of a physical panel, and the darks at the outer edges fall away into the board itself rather than into painted shadow. Part of our Harry Potter collection. For the lake crossing on its own see the boats beneath the castle at night, and for the master in the top corner the full-length portrait in black.