Darth Revan with Kylo Ren lightsaber — Print & Oil Painting

The interest here is a deliberate mismatch: an armoured figure from the oldest layer of the saga's history, holding a weapon that will not be built for several thousand years.

The blade is unmistakable. A ragged red beam runs down to the lower left, spitting sparks along its whole length, and at the emitter two short lateral tongues of the same fire flare out to either side of the hilt. It is a weapon that looks like it is failing, and the artist has painted the instability honestly: the edges of the beam break up, and loose embers scatter across the robe beside it.

The figure holding it is painted like an old master study: thin glazes, a warm ochre ground showing through, brushwork visible in the drapery. The armour is battered steel: a great round boss on each shoulder and another at the sternum, plate over the abdomen, the metal scratched and stained a rusty brown. Below the belt the robe falls in deep vertical folds of dark red.

The mask is cool where the rest is warm: grey-blue metal with the black eye slit and the raised central ridge, set well back inside a dark hood so that only the faceplate catches any light.

The background is barely a place, an abstract field of brown and ochre with a burst of gold breaking in at the right, worked like a wall that has been scraped and repainted many times. It gives the figure nothing to stand on and nowhere to be, which suits a picture whose whole premise is that these two things should never have met. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the crossguard weapon in the hands it belongs to and the same armour crossing a blue and a red blade.