Lando Calrissian Smiling With a Drink in Hand — Print & Oil Painting

A wide letterbox crop with the head placed dead centre and close enough that the top of the hair runs off the upper edge. Everything in the picture has been subordinated to a face.

The smile is the whole performance: full, open, teeth showing, the moustache lifted, the eyes creased hard at the outer corners and directed slightly off-camera to our left. It is a salesman's smile, and the paint is confident enough to make it charming rather than shifty.

He wears a mustard-yellow shirt with a wide collar open at the throat, a black harness of narrow straps crossing the chest, and a fine gold chain at the neck. His right fist is up beside the shoulder, closed and small, in the private gesture of a man whose luck has just turned.

In the lower left, thrown well out of focus, a flat green card marked with a pale roundel is held up in the other hand. Behind his shoulder a screen of pale figures dissolves into mauve, close enough in tone to read as a mural or a crowd without ever settling into either. The card and that wall are the only clues to the room, and neither of them resolves.

The fortunes of this character have always been settled across a table rather than in a fight: he lost a freighter that way and ran a mining city on the proceeds of similar evenings. From our Star Wars collection, beside the game itself in progress and the man he lost that ship to, standing in it.