General Grievous Overlooking a Droid Battlefield — Print & Oil Painting

The one picture in this group where the main figure has his back to us for the whole of it. Grievous stands on a low rise at the left of a wide landscape, seen from behind, wrapped in a long dark cape that falls to the ground and hides almost all of the machinery underneath. Only the pale crown of the mask turns in profile, and a short blue gleam shows at his shoulder where a hilt is stowed.

Battle droids stand around him in loose ones and twos, thin, tan and long-necked, some facing out over the valley and some facing nowhere in particular. None of them is fighting. One is reaching an arm out toward the drop. They have the posture of a work party that has been told to wait.

What they are looking at fills the rest of the canvas. A broad rust-red plain runs out to a rocky butte in the middle distance, and the whole floor of it is scattered with small white shapes, hundreds of them, too far off to resolve into anything but too regular to be stones. A wrecked transport lies burning at the right with a column of smoke going up, and the sky above is heavy grey cloud with warm light breaking through it low down.

The paint is thin and atmospheric throughout, and the artist has kept the values close, so the eye has to work across the plain slowly rather than being handed a focal point.

It is a picture about the minute after rather than the minute during, and putting the commander in silhouette with his face turned away is what keeps it from becoming a victory portrait. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the same commander standing over the fallen at close range and the shipboard scene with his droids around him.