Luke Skywalker Ready for Battle on Hoth — Print & Oil Painting

The format is the first thing to deal with. This is an extremely tall, extremely narrow panel, closer to a banner than to a canvas, and the figure fills it from mid-thigh to the crown of the head with no spare width at either side. It is framed the way a game frames a character you are about to choose.

The cold-weather kit gets the attention. A cream quilted parka with wide vertical channels of padding, a heavy woven scarf wound at the neck and hanging down the chest, a soft padded cap with a band across the brow, and thick gloves fastened at the wrist. Every one of those materials is painted differently, which is harder than it sounds when they are all the same colour.

Goggles sit pushed up on the forehead: gold-tinted lenses in a pale rim with the strap crossing the cap. They are the only warm note in the picture and they have been placed exactly where the eye lands first.

The blade is held vertically in both gloved hands straight up the centre of the panel, pale blue and white, throwing its light onto the fingers and the underside of the jaw. Behind him there is nothing at all: a flat blue-grey field, evenly lit, with no horizon, no ice and no weather.

The face is young and unmarked, mouth closed, eyes straight ahead. At this point in the story the weapon in his hands is his father's rather than his own and he has had almost no instruction in using it, which the calm of the portrait quietly declines to mention. Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the same man beside his speeder on that ice and the force coming the other way across it.