Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Rest Forehead to Forehead — Print & Oil Painting

Watercolour, and unmistakably so. The paper grain shows through every wash, the pigment has granulated and settled into the tooth, edges bloom softly where wet met wet, and in several places the white of the sheet has simply been left as the highlight. It is the lightest and most fragile thing in this whole group.

Two heads in profile, brought together until the brows almost touch and both faces are tilted slightly down. Her eyes are closed; his are lowered. Nothing else of either body is described: a shoulder on the left, a fall of dark cloth on the right, and everything below the collarbone dissolves into wash.

The one passage given hard detail is her headdress: a fitted gold net over the coiled hair, worked with small beads and a band of coloured stones across the brow, painted stroke by stroke while the faces beside it are handled in soft transparent layers. Concentrating the drawing there lets the skin stay luminous, which is the whole trick of the medium.

Behind them the background is pure abstraction, turquoise running into ochre, rose into pale green, applied loosely and allowed to bleed. There is no room, no window, no world at all. The two of them are held in a wash of colour with nothing around them, which is a fair description of the arrangement they had.

In our Star Wars collection, next to the embrace among the dead trees and the terrace under the stars.