Captain America on motorbike — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is built like a tracking shot taken from a car running alongside. The road surface, the crash barrier and the green verge behind it are all smeared into horizontal streaks, while the bike and the man on it stay perfectly sharp. Only two things in the frame are standing still relative to us, and they are the two things worth looking at.

He is dressed for the road rather than for a poster. Grey padded riding armour with quilted panels at the shoulder and elbow, dark trousers, heavy boots on the pegs, tan gloves closed around the grips, and a plain helmet with no wings, no star and no lettering on it. Nothing about the outfit announces anything.

The shield does all of that work on its own. It is slung flat across his back, tilted toward us, and the artist has painted it as an old object: the red rings dulled and scuffed, the white ring gone ivory, the blue centre faded almost to grey with the star sitting pale inside it. It is the only saturated thing in the image, which the measurement confirms, because the canvas as a whole reads bright, cool and almost colourless.

The machine under him has been observed rather than invented. A stripped street bike with a V-twin between the frame rails, a short flat tank, twin rear shocks, a belt final drive to the back wheel and a small tail lamp on the tidy rear section. It carries no badge anywhere the eye can reach, and the artist has given the engine cases and the fork legs more attention than the sky.

An anonymous man on an ordinary road is the correct setting for this character. He was pulled out of Arctic ice long after the war he was built for had finished, and every story since has put him in a decade he did not choose, which is why a helmet with nothing written on it suits him better than most costumes do. From our Marvel collection, next to the same soldier seen aboard an aircraft and the wartime uniform, both hands resting on the shield.