Thrawn Seated for a Formal Oil Painting — Print & Oil Painting

A seated state portrait, and nearly all of it is dark. The ground is a deep olive-brown void with no wall, no window and no furniture legible in it beyond the faint suggestion of a chair back at the right. Measured brightness is just over a fifth of full, and the figure emerges from that darkness the way sitters do in old varnished canvases: whitest at the chest, dissolving at the edges.

One colour event carries the picture. A broad orange-gold sash runs from the right shoulder down across the body to the waist, and everything else is white cloth, dark ground and blue skin. The sash is laid on with a wet dragging stroke that lets the weave of the canvas show through, and it is the only warm thing in the frame.

The coat is a soft white with fringed epaulettes at both shoulders and heavy gold cuffs buttoned at the sleeve. It is loosely handled: each fold is suggested with three or four strokes, the buttons are single dabs, and nothing is drawn tightly. That looseness is exactly what lets the head, worked far more closely, hold the eye.

He is turned three-quarter and looking away to the left, past the painter. The face is gaunter here than in the other studies, the cheek hollowed, the mouth thin, and the red eyes small and dull rather than glowing. It is the least flattering portrait of him in this group and probably the most convincing.

State portraits exist to make a man look inevitable, and they manage it by clearing everything out of the room except him. That convention has been borrowed intact here and handed to an officer from a service that never had it, which is the whole idea and needs no more help than the sash already gives it. From our Star Wars collection, next to the standing portrait in the same borrowed idiom and the chain of office painted against fire.