Darth Vader Fights Luke Skywalker Before Darth Sidious — Print & Oil Painting

Where the companion painting of this scene is cool and wide, this one is close, hot and deliberately lurid. Vader fills the lower two-thirds of an upright canvas, seen almost frontally and leaning back, with the mask lacquered to a wet gloss and rimmed in hard scarlet along every contour.

The handling is airbrush at full volume. Every surface has been over-modelled into ribs, welts and glassy highlights until the raised arm at the upper left and the drapery below it read less like leather than like carapace. It is an excessive way to paint this costume and it commits to the excess completely.

The two blades cross low and to the right in a burst of white. The red one comes down from the upper left with a bleached core; the green one drives up from the lower right; and where they meet the artist has let the colour blow out entirely, which is the brightest event on the canvas by a wide margin.

High above all of this, at the top of a flight of pale steps, the Emperor sits small and upright on his throne with a cold blue glow in his lap. Behind him a round window opens on a starfield with a single small planet, and lit blue panels flank the chamber at both upper corners.

Stacking the composition vertically, with the seated figure at the top and the fight boiling at the bottom, turns a duel into a diagram of who is standing where. From our Star Wars collection, beside the wide, cold treatment of the same room and their first meeting, years earlier.