Thanos in Tranquility with Infinity Gauntlet — Print & Oil Painting

The left third of this wide canvas has been given over to plants. Tall stems rise the full height of the picture with lemon yellow flower heads opening along them, painted wet and thick, and among them the artist has scattered dozens of small floating points of light. They are the brightest thing in the image and they are between us and the figure, so we look at him through a hedge.

He is sitting on a step under the eaves of a plank building, leaning forward with his forearms across his knees, and he is not wearing a helmet. The head is bald, violet, deeply creased at the brow and along the ridged chin, and the eyes are directed away to the left at something out past the edge of the frame. Gold and blue plate covers the chest and the shoulders; the arms below it are bare.

The glove is the quietest object in the picture. It hangs over the near knee with the fingers loose, and the artist has painted it as damaged goods: the gold gone dark and matt, the plating scorched along the back of the hand, the stones dull and set in their sockets without a glow between them. It is being carried rather than worn.

Beyond the porch a field of tall crops runs back to low hills under a violet and rose dusk. Red leads the measurement with orange second at moderate saturation, and the brightness stays low, because almost all of the light in this canvas has been concentrated into the flowers in the foreground.

The calm is the least explicable thing about him and the comics give a reason for it. He did all of it to be noticed by one specific person: Death herself, courted for years with increasingly enormous gifts, of which halving the population of the universe was simply the largest. It did not work in the way he hoped. Having done it, he outranked her, and she would no longer speak to him at all. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same armour standing calm above a smoking field and the same glove lit on a throne of blades.