Darth Vader Watches Over Padmé Amid a Burning City — Print & Oil Painting

A quiet, cold, wide picture in which the loudest thing is the smallest. The palette is almost entirely grey-blue (stone, smoke, overcast), with fire admitted only as small orange points scattered across the middle distance.

In the immediate foreground, lying on a low bier that runs the full width of the frame, is Padmé, rendered pale as carved stone: the long waved hair spread out around the head, the hands brought together on the breast, the face turned up and composed. White flower arrangements stand at both ends of the bier. She is painted like an effigy rather than like a body, which is what keeps the image from being unbearable.

Behind her, framed between two columns, Vader stands at a balustrade with his back to us, looking out. He is a flat black silhouette with no detail whatsoever, no highlight on the helmet and no texture in the cape, and he is placed exactly on the centre line, directly above her head.

Beyond the terrace a city burns. Towers and slab blocks recede into haze, several of them alight, two heavy columns of black smoke climbing at the right, and half a dozen TIE fighters crossing the grey sky in loose formation.

None of this ever happened in that order. She was buried on another world, in daylight, and he was not there. The picture knows it, and builds the scene anyway as the thing he would have to be looking at. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the funeral as it was actually held and the mask looming over the two of them in better days.