Jango Fett on Kamino Clone army — Print & Oil Painting

We are standing on the viewing gallery with the hosts, looking out and slightly down at merchandise. Two Kaminoans frame the picture like curtains, one at each edge, cropped by the frame and painted in cool blue-white, their heads turned inward toward the men between them.

The anatomy of those two is the best work on the canvas: long tapering necks, small skulls, huge black almond eyes set high and wide, mouths reduced to a short line. They are lit from below by the deck lights, which makes them read as sculpture rather than as company.

The transaction sits at the centre. A man in blue-grey Mandalorian plate stands three-quarters away from us with a jetpack on his back and the rangefinder folded down beside the visor. Beside him a human in an orange flight suit leans forward over the rail and points out across the hall, mid-sentence.

What he is pointing at fills the middle distance: rank after rank of white armour drawn up in blocks on a floor gridded with cyan light, several levels below and small enough to count in hundreds. Beyond the glass, domed platforms stand on their legs above a black sea, under a storm sky with one bright ragged break in the cloud.

The quiet joke of the composition is that the man in armour is the original of every figure down there. His fee for the work was payment plus one unaltered copy for himself, which is the only part of the deal he seems to have cared about. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the same balcony reduced to silhouettes in the rain and the template standing in front of his own ranks.