Obi-Wan Kenobi Stands Over Fallen Troopers in A New Hope — Print & Oil Painting

An interior painted almost entirely in vertical bars. The wall behind the figure is a run of tall illuminated strips, some solid, some broken into segments, ranked and receding to the right; the floor is polished dark and catches enough of them to double the pattern. Everything in the picture is measured against those verticals.

Kenobi stands a little left of centre, and old, with white hair, white beard and deep lines around the eye, in a heavy brown outer robe over a cream tunic and a wide leather belt. The blade is out, held up and away to the right in one hand, and it is the only blue on the canvas. He is not looking along it. His head is turned down and to the other side.

That is where the picture keeps its subject. Piled at the lower right, and given far less light than the figure, is a heap of stormtroopers: helmets at wrong angles, a splayed white gauntlet, a dropped weapon, a thin thread of smoke lifting off the mass. The artist has kept the heap deliberately hard to read, so it registers as a shape first and as a count second.

The film this belongs to never quite shows the moment. It gives him the corridor, the robe and the blade, then cuts elsewhere. The canvas has painted the part in between, and the expression it settles on is not triumph: it is a man looking at what he has just done and finding no satisfaction in it.

Our Star Wars collection keeps it beside the same figure deflecting a storm of bolts and the old man watching X-wings from a desert cave.