Mace Windu Stands Atop a Pile of Fallen Troopers — Print & Oil Painting

The composition is a monument, and it borrows the shape without apology: a heap of armour occupying the bottom third of a tall canvas, one man standing on the summit of it, and a pale moon placed directly behind his head like a plate of light.

The heap rewards slow reading. White helmets lie on their sides at every angle, one scout helmet turns its wide dark visor up at us, a heavy gauntleted hand is thrown open above the pile, rifles have been dropped across the bodies, and dark stains have been worked into the plastoid where the limbs meet. Not one piece has been arranged to look tidy.

He is dressed in ragged pale robes rather than the dark tunic he usually wears, torn at the hem and bound at the waist. The head is bare and tipped down, the near fist is closed and held at chest height, and the far hand grips the hilt low and steady. He is looking at what he is standing on.

Colour has been withheld from everything except one line. The night is blue-grey, the armour is bone, the cloud behind is slate, and the blade crosses the lower half of the frame as a hard magenta bar that lights almost nothing beyond its own edges.

That colour names him instantly. His is the only purple blade in the films, carried by the Jedi who came closer than anyone else to finishing Palpatine in his own office. From our Star Wars collection, next to the same weapon caught at the instant of ignition and a comparable heap of armour assembled by the other side.