Knight in the Flower Field — Print & Oil Painting

There is no field. The flowers form a solid wall from edge to edge, packed the way a seventeenth-century still life is packed: roses in red, cream, coral and butter yellow, white daisies, one spiky chrysanthemum, poppies, buds and dark leaves filling every remaining gap. The armour has been set into that wall rather than placed in a landscape.

The knight stands square to us in engraved plate, visor closed, both gauntlets folded over the pommel of a sword whose point rests on the ground between his feet. That is the pose carved on medieval tomb effigies across Europe, hands on the hilt and the weapon at rest, and it turns the figure into a monument standing in the middle of all this fresh growth.

The metal is painted cold and dark, blue-grey with etched bands across the thigh plates and pauldrons, and it is the only cold thing in the picture. Petals have fallen on the shoulders and breastplate and a few red ones are caught in the fluting, which is the detail that keeps the contrast from being merely decorative.

Light arrives from the front and falls away fast, so the deepest flowers go almost black and the eye keeps returning to the helm and the blade. The tall format helps: the sword runs the full height of the panel like a spine.

It hangs in our Knight & Crusade collection. Its counterweight is the duel in the dark, where the same kind of harness is shown doing the work it was actually built for.