Darth Vader Escorts a Captured Princess Leia — Print & Oil Painting

A double portrait in which only one of the two has a face, and the artist has given her all of the picture's attention. Leia stands centre-right in the long white gown, hands brought together low in front of her with a metal restraint closed around the wrists, and her head is turned sharply to the right. The expression is the best-painted thing here: not fear, not defiance, but appraisal. She is looking at something and deciding about it.

Vader is behind and to her left, half a step back, and he is rendered as a single black mass with the mask catching a cool grey highlight along the dome and the cheek flares. One gloved hand hangs at his side. He is not touching her and not looking at her; he is simply taller and closer than anyone would want.

The setting is a hangar under long rows of fluorescent ceiling strips, and the light is flat, even and completely undramatic, the light of a working building. A red-and-white hull fills the space behind them, and stormtroopers stand in loose ranks down both edges, blurred slightly with distance.

Two droids close the right side, a pale protocol unit and a squat astromech beside a knot of officers, and the whole right-hand third is busy with routine activity that nobody has interrupted for this.

That ordinariness is what gives the image its edge. There is no drama in the room; a prisoner is being walked from one place to another, and the only person who seems to understand how much is at stake is the one in restraints. From our Star Wars collection, beside the same woman with a weapon in her hands and the corridor he came down to take the ship.