Obi-Wan Kenobi Ignites His Saber on Tatooine — Print & Oil Painting

Ben Kenobi, old now, with the blade lit and held across his chest. The composition is built on a single diagonal: the sabre enters at the top-left corner and runs down to the fist at bottom-centre, cutting the canvas in two and throwing a hard blue light up onto the beard and the underside of the nose.

That light is the trick of the piece. Everything the blade touches is rendered in cold blue-white — half the face, the knuckles, the collar of the robe — and everything it does not touch stays in the dusty rose of a Tatooine evening. The artist has let the two colour temperatures meet down the middle of the face without blending them, which is what gives the portrait its unease.

Behind him the twin suns are setting, one high and pale, one low and deeper orange, over the mud-brick domes of a moisture farm settlement. It is the most famous image in the saga, used here as background rather than subject.

The face carries the story: not the confident general of the Clone Wars but a man who has been waiting nineteen years in a desert. Compare it with the armoured Clone Wars study in our Star Wars collection and the distance between the two is the whole point.