Anakin Skywalker Mourns Padmé Amidala's Funeral — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is divided into three horizontal registers, and it should be read from the bottom up. At the foot of the picture she lies in state on a pale bier: head turned slightly, eyes closed, dark hair loosened and threaded with small white flowers, hands folded low over a gown of deep blue and violet. She takes up the full width of the frame.

The middle band is the procession. A dark crowd lines a route in the dusk, and between them the artist has laid in dozens of small flames: candles, lamps, points of orange and gold scattered across the whole width of the picture and reflected in the ground. Nothing in that register is drawn in detail; it is a field of light standing in for a city that turned out.

Above both, and painted much larger, the two of them face each other as they were: he on the left in dark robes with the hair drawn back and the thin braid at his shoulder, she on the right with flowers pinned into loose curls, bare-shouldered, looking up at him. Their heads are close and neither is touching the other. It is the only register with any warmth in the skin.

The structure does the mourning. Memory sits at the top of the canvas, the public ceremony runs through the middle, and the body lies along the bottom edge closest to the viewer, three states of the same woman stacked in order of how far away each one now is.

The medium is worth noticing: worked in coloured pencil and wash on board, with the tooth of the surface showing through the darks and a painted border left visible along the edges. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the embrace in the forest and the canvas that puts the mask above them.