Jean Grey Consumed by the Phoenix Force's Fire — Print & Oil Painting

Few canvases in this lot carry as much saturation as this one, and every bit of it has gone into a single colour family. Scarlet, orange and white run from the centre outward, cooling only into dark maroon at the corners, and there is no blue, no green and no neutral anywhere in the picture to give the eye a rest.

She is floating rather than standing, seen from slightly below, the toes pointed down and nothing under them. The arms are held out from the body with the elbows bent and the fingers curled but not closed, the head is tipped back, and her hair streams up and out to both sides in long dark auburn ropes lifted by the heat.

The costume is dark red with a bare midriff, a gold sash knotted at the waist with both ends trailing away behind her, and gold banding at the bust and along one thigh. It is painted as the only solid, opaque thing in the picture. Everything else is either burning or in the way of something burning.

The fire behind her is organised. A white hot core sits directly behind the shoulders and head, spreading outward into an enormous soft bloom that fills the upper half, and through the whole field the artist has flung small dark flakes of debris travelling in every direction. Below the waist the flames thin into a red brown haze and the ground, if there is one, never appears.

Feeding is what this looks like and feeding is what it was. In the story that made the character famous the power inside her went to a star to replenish itself, drained it until it collapsed, and killed roughly five billion people on the inhabited world beside it, an act she was not opposed to at the time. She was put on trial for it afterwards and ended the matter herself. A figure with her head thrown back inside her own furnace is painting the moment before any of that was counted. Part of our Marvel collection, beside the same woman in a gold mask, before any of the fire and another woman held in cosmic fire above the Earth.