Captain Rex Raises Twin Pistols Before the Republic Crest — Print & Oil Painting

Painted in oils on an olive ground, with the brush left visible everywhere except the armour. The background is a wash of moss green and umber, scumbled and streaked, and the figure has been lifted out of it by keeping the white plates cleaner and harder than anything around them.

The pose is pure theatre and knows it. Both arms are up, elbows bent, a pistol in each fist with the barrels pointing at the ceiling, and a thin ribbon of smoke curls off the muzzle on the right. It is the gesture of somebody who has just finished rather than somebody about to start.

The armour is Phase II plate: rounded pauldrons, a segmented torso, a heavy belt, and a dark kama hanging from it in stiff folds with blue trim down the edges. Blue markings run over the crown and around the visor of the helmet, and the paint is chipped at every angle where a plate would take a knock.

Behind his head, a circular emblem hangs in the haze in cool teal, its spokes radiating out past the shoulders. It is painted as light rather than as an object, which turns a piece of military heraldry into something closer to a halo.

That halo is the point of the picture. This is a soldier grown in a vat for an army that was designed, before he was born, to be turned against the people it served. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the same helmet in falling snow and the pair of them fighting back to back.