Doctor Doom Stands With Arms Crossed at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

A course of rough masonry runs across the bottom of this tall canvas and he stands directly behind it, cut off at the thigh. The stones are painted individually, chipped and lichened, and they establish two things at once: that we are looking at somebody on a wall, and that we are standing below him.

The arms are folded across the chest and the pose holds absolutely still. Over the shoulders is a hooded cloak in a dull forest green with a heavy pale fur collar, pinned at each shoulder by a round gold clasp and hung with a chain between them; underneath it the body is dark sculpted plate, the chest muscles moulded into the metal, closed at the waist by a broad gold belt with a rectangular buckle. A gauntlet rests on the stone at the lower right.

The mask gives nothing at all. It is a plain metal face, riveted around the edge and slotted at the eyes and mouth, and the artist has lit it from the left so that one cheek catches a hard highlight and the other goes to shadow. The hood comes forward over the crown and leaves only that oval showing.

Behind him the sky is banded: a bar of hot orange low down, grey brown cloud stacked above it, a dark plain running back to a mountain on the right. Orange leads the measurement with red second at low brightness, and the whole canvas has been kept soft and slightly rubbed, as though the paint had been worked back with a rag while it was still open.

The face under that plate was ruined twice and the second time was his own doing. An explosion in a laboratory left him with a single scar; he went into the mountains, was taken in by an order who made him a suit of armour, and put the iron mask against his skin before it had cooled. Everything he has covered up since, he applied himself, in a hurry, and never explained. From our Marvel collection, alongside another figure who rules in a helmet and a cape and a second man who is only ever seen through a faceplate.