Anakin Skywalker Stands Above Mustafar's Rising Flames — Print & Oil Painting

A tall canvas in which everything except the man is burning. The background is one continuous fire: white-hot and yellow at the lower right, orange through the middle, deepening into heavy crimson and finally into near-black smoke at the top left. A long dark arc curves through the upper right like a bank of cloud that has caught.

Anakin stands at the bottom, full length, on a small pale rock that is the only solid ground anywhere in the picture. He faces us square, feet apart, in the dark layered dress of the order: cross-wrapped robe, wide belt, tabards falling to the knee, tall boots. Against all that heat he is painted almost entirely in cool dark browns, and the artist has let the fire eat into his outline at the shoulders and the hem.

The blade is out, held down and away to the left in one hand, and it is blue. On a canvas this saturated that single cool line is the loudest thing in the image, a narrow bar of the one colour the fire cannot manufacture. The gloved hand closed round the hilt is the most carefully drawn passage in the whole figure.

What the arrangement achieves is suspension. He is above the fire rather than in it, calm, weapon lowered, standing on the smallest possible piece of stone, and the blade is still the colour it was when he was given it.

From our Star Wars collection. Compare the canvas where the same figure ignites a blade in the same fire and the version standing over those flames in the mask.