Severus Snape with Blood-Red Rose Petals — Print & Oil Painting

Flat colour, hard line, no rendered texture at all: the drawing belongs to the language of the webcomic rather than to the oil painting, and it puts that flatness to work. Two broad golden bands sweep behind the figure, a fan of fine radiating lines opens behind those, and a long pale snake comes down across the full height of the panel in a diamond mesh of scales.

Snape stands centred in black, eyes half closed and turned down, hair falling across one cheek in single ink strokes. Both hands are raised to the throat and cupped around a mass of red roses that spills over his fingers, and the petals are coming loose one at a time and dropping down the front of the coat. His nails are tipped the same red.

One small detail carries the meaning. A thin line of blood runs from the corner of the mouth to the jaw, and the roses sit exactly where a wound to the throat would be. The snake behind him, jaws slightly parted, completes the sentence. The picture states how this character's story ends without illustrating it, in the least literal terms available.

Colour is rationed to three notes: gold ground, black coat and hair, red at the mouth and in the hands. Nothing else is admitted. The tall narrow proportion presses all of it into a single column. Part of our Harry Potter collection, and a deliberate contrast with the sober full-length study of the same man. The serpent has a canvas of its own in the study of the wand and the snake.