Darth Vader Marches Flanked by Death Troopers — Print & Oil Painting

Three figures walking straight at the viewer in a shallow wedge, with Vader half a pace ahead and the two troopers set back at either shoulder. It is a formation portrait, and the arrangement is kept almost perfectly symmetrical apart from one thing: the right hand.

That hand is raised to chest height, fingers half closed and the palm turned inward, caught at the moment before a grip tightens. It is the only limb in the picture doing anything at all, and it is set against pale smoke so that it registers before the mask does. The other hand carries the blade low and angled down to the left, and the red line runs off the bottom corner of the canvas.

The escort is painted black on black. Their armour is smooth and unribbed, the helmets narrow with a slim dark visor and no cheek vents, and each carries a heavy weapon held upright across the chest. Lit only along their edges, at a glance they look less like two men than like the shadow the central figure throws in two directions. These are the Empire's specialist troops rather than line infantry, assigned to protect the people it could not afford to lose.

Colour does something specific at the foot of the frame. The background is cold, grey-blue smoke and a scatter of dark cloud, but the ground is washed in red, and small red particles drift upward through the lower third. The blade accounts for some of that light and not all of it, and the picture leaves the rest unexplained.

From our Star Wars collection, next to the same figure leading stormtroopers and walkers and a death trooper painted on his own.