Harry Potter Flying past the Quidditch Hoops — Print & Oil Painting

Somebody has written the school's name across the upper left of the sky in looping blue script, the way a railway poster of the nineteen thirties would carry the name of a resort. That one flourish fixes the register of the whole image: less a scene than an advertisement for a place.

The castle behind is handled broadly, in slabs of slate and cream, its towers stacked without much interest in how they join. What the painter cared about is the green hill it stands on, laid in with thick horizontal strokes, and the goal hoops on their tall poles at the right, drawn as flat grey rings, one of them cropped by the frame edge.

Harry cuts through the middle at speed. He lies almost flat along the broom with both gloved hands on the handle and his elbows out, scarlet and gold showing at the cuff and the shoulder, the dark flying robe dragged behind him into a hard triangle. His head is turned up and towards us, which is the one awkward passage in the drawing and also the only reason we get a face at all.

Colour is pitched high throughout: emerald grass, cobalt sky, an ochre streak of bristles at the tail of the broom, a single red flash where the robe lifts. From our Harry Potter collection, alongside the trio on the great staircase and the whole cast gathered on one canvas.