Jabba the Hutt Holds Court as Luke Confronts His Guards — Print & Oil Painting

A very wide canvas, roughly two and a half times as broad as it is tall, and the proportion is used the way a frieze uses it: the cast is spread along one shallow band and read from left to right rather than into depth.

The left third is the approach. A man in black with a heavy grey cloak strides in with his back to us, hood down, a blaster held low in his right hand. Along the wall behind him a knot of hired muscle waits: a snouted brown figure with a long forked staff, a masked one in an orange vest, others further back in the shadow. Not one of them has moved.

The centre is the throne. Jabba fills it, tan and green and enormously heavy, propped on one elbow with his tail curled out along the front of the dais and small red eyes set in a face that is mostly jowl. A woman in a metal costume sits at the front edge of the platform. C-3PO stands behind on the left in polished gold with R2-D2 beside him, and a bowl of green liquid with a live frog in it has been left within easy reach.

The right third is the guard. Two thickset green-skinned guards in studded armour stand shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the dais, one of them with a long-hafted weapon, another masked figure beyond them. Directly behind Jabba, in green and maroon armour with the rangefinder folded against his helmet, stands the bounty hunter. Round red lamps hang from the ceiling and warm the whole interior to ochre and dust.

Read across, the arrangement states the balance of the room: one man walking in, one creature who does not need to stand up, and everybody else positioned between them. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the court at its leisure and the armoured figure at the right of this frame painted alone.