A Nightsister Standing Before a Crimson Curtain — Print & Oil Painting

The most saturated canvas in this group by a long way, and effectively all of it is one colour. Measured saturation runs past three quarters. The background is a deep crimson hanging worked in soft vertical folds, the tunic is a hard scarlet, and the only relief anywhere is the cool grey-brown of her sleeves and the near-white of her skin.

That skin is the point of contrast. It is painted chalk-pale and almost bloodless, and across the nose and both cheeks the artist has laid a set of angular tan markings: straight-edged, geometric, more like cracks in a glazed surface than like tattooing. One runs under the eye and out to the temple, another splits the bridge of the nose. The lips are painted a dark plum that reads nearly black.

Her hair is cut short and pale, swept back off the forehead, and she is turned three-quarter with her chin slightly raised, looking straight out with a level and unfriendly steadiness. The costume is a sleeveless scarlet tunic over a ribbed brown-grey underlayer with a high collar, a small gold clasp at the breastbone, and a wide dark leather belt at the waist.

Down in the lower left corner there is a low red table or altar carrying a row of small flames, seven or eight of them, yellow-orange and evenly spaced. They are the only warm light in the picture and they are placed at the edge, well away from the face, so they never compete with it.

Her order kept to one planet and practised its own kind of power there, and it was very nearly wiped out in a single afternoon when a droid army was sent down to do it. A survivor standing alone in a red room with a row of candles behind her is the correct way to paint what was left. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the order's most famous daughter beneath a crimson hood and the general whose machines were sent to end them.