Princess Leia's Golden Bikini Aboard the Millennium Falcon — Print & Oil Painting

Painted in the airbrushed idiom of a nineteen-eighties paperback cover: smooth gradients, no visible brushwork, warm skin tones against cool machinery, and a figure placed centrally and lit as though for a photograph. The finish is deliberately slick and the drawing underneath it is competent.

Leia stands three-quarter on, turned toward the left of the frame with the head in profile and the chin lifted. The costume is the metal one from the palace, and the painter has treated it as goldsmithing: chased and beaten plate, a scrolled panel at the hip, matched armlets, and a deep maroon skirt panel falling from the belt. A heavy cream robe is draped over one arm and spills down behind her, and it does most of the compositional work, filling the left third and framing the figure against the wall.

The hair is worth its own sentence. It is bound into a long plaited coil wound with gold rings and ornaments, running down over one shoulder, and it is the most patiently rendered thing in the picture.

Behind her the Falcon is drawn from reference and drawn well: the ribbed circular corridor arch, the padded wall panels, the runs of conduit and hose, the seat frames, a lit red readout on the far bulkhead. On the right a man sits forward in a chair in a pale shirt and neckcloth with goggles pushed up on his forehead, one hand raised to them, watching her with an expression of frank and slightly stunned amusement. He is the reason the picture is funny rather than merely decorative.

It should be said that this is a mash-up rather than a scene: the costume belongs to a palace on a desert world and the room belongs to a freighter, and the two never met. The painting knows that perfectly well, which is why it has put a witness in the corner. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the same cabin with its usual occupants and the court that costume actually came from.