Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker Duel Beneath a Fiery Sky — Print & Oil Painting

The most restrained picture in the group and probably the most effective. Two figures, both pure silhouette, stand on a narrow platform along the bottom of a tall canvas, and everything above them is fire.

That fire has been painted as one enormous curling wave. It rises from behind the platform, arcs over to the left and breaks at the top of the frame, laid in with long sweeping strokes in scarlet, vermilion and a pale gold core, with embers and torn debris flicked across it. It occupies perhaps three-quarters of the surface and it is the most saturated passage in the whole set.

Against it the two men are tiny and completely featureless: no faces, no colour, no costume detail, just two dark shapes leaning into each other with their legs braced wide. Their blades meet at one small point of white light just above the midline of the frame, and that point is the only cool colour in the picture.

The platform beneath them is drawn with just enough industrial detail to be convincing, some panelling, a run of pipe and two small indicator lights at either end, and then abandoned. Nothing else in the frame is described at all.

Refusing to show either face is what makes it work. The fight is famous enough that no likeness is needed, and reducing it to two silhouettes and a spark turns a long choreographed sequence into the single instant it is actually remembered as. From our Star Wars collection, beside another silhouette treatment and the same duel drawn close and in colour.