Darth Vader Leading an Imperial Column of Walkers — Print & Oil Painting

Another wide band of a canvas, and this one is staged in three hard layers of focus. Nearest, filling the left quarter and thrown completely out of focus, the back and shoulder of a stormtrooper in white, one gloved hand lifted. He is too close to read and too large to ignore, and he puts the viewer inside the ranks rather than in front of them.

The middle layer is sharp. Vader walks forward at the centre, full length, cape hanging in two long folds, the mask level and the hands empty. There is no weapon anywhere in this picture. At his left shoulder walks an officer in a grey uniform and peaked cap, bare-headed, face lit and clearly painted, keeping pace half a step behind.

The far layer is troops and machinery. Ranks of stormtroopers stand to either side in white, blurred by distance, and behind them grey structures rise into the haze with the head and forelegs of a walker showing above the line at the right. Everything back there is a shade of pewter.

The measured saturation is under a fifth, and it shows: this is a picture with almost no colour in it at all, built from white armour, grey wool and black cloth. The one warm note is the officer's face.

What is being painted is a procession rather than a battle. Nobody is firing, nobody is running, and the composition, narrow and horizontal and crowded on both sides, is the shape of a corridor of onlookers. From our Star Wars collection, beside the formal review of the troops and the walkers crossing the snow without him.