Captain America Charges Through Rain and Lightning — Print & Oil Painting

This one is a rendered three dimensional image rather than a painting, and it is worth saying so, because the surfaces behave accordingly. The shield has a true mirror finish with the reflection of a light source sliding round its rings, the water beads carry accurate refraction, and the costume shows a woven microtexture that holds a soft specular sheen along every muscle.

He is driving forward and slightly to our left, low over the front leg, the shield strapped to his left forearm and thrown out ahead of him so that it occupies the entire lower right of the frame. The right arm is cocked back with the fist closed. The head is down, the brow is pulled in, and the eyes are fixed on something past our shoulder.

Water is suspended everywhere. Hundreds of droplets hang in the black air at every scale, from fat beads near the lens to a fine mist at the back, and more of them sit on the shield face and the blue fabric. Nothing is falling: the whole picture has been frozen at a shutter speed that stops rain dead.

Two clusters of pale blue electrical filaments crackle in from the lower left and the lower right, thin, branching and cold. Against a background of pure black they and the shield are the only lit things in the image, which is why the measurement returns very low brightness alongside one of the highest saturation readings in the lot.

The circle at the centre of all this was not the original plan. When the character first appeared in 1941 he carried a pointed heater shield, a rival publisher objected that it resembled the emblem of their own flag wearing hero, and by the second issue the artists had replaced it with a disc. The most recognisable object in the catalogue exists because of a complaint from a competitor. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same figure walking forward through red paint streaks and the shield carried in flat bright sunlight instead.