The Rancor Roaring in Its Fiery Den — Print & Oil Painting

A wide banner filled almost entirely by one animal. The head is turned toward us at the left, the shoulders hunch up behind it, and one arm reaches down into the lower right corner, so the body makes a heavy diagonal mass across the whole strip with no room left over.

The hide is where the work went. It is a mottled grey-brown, thickened into overlapping folds at the neck and the elbow, ridged with a row of bony plates along the spine and shoulder, and pitted all over with a coarse warty texture that has been painted individually rather than stippled. Around the mouth the skin goes pale and slack, and it gathers into deep creases as the jaw opens.

And the jaw is wide open. Two rows of irregular pointed teeth, a dark red tongue set well back, small nostril slits above, and a pair of tiny eyes pushed up under a heavy brow, so much smaller than the mouth that the face reads as almost entirely appetite. The right hand comes forward with four long curved talons spread and slightly blurred, closer to us than anything else in the frame.

The background is not a place. It is a wall of flame-shaped forms in scarlet, orange and dark red, part fire and part vegetation, arranged in upward licking strokes on both sides of the head. It gives the animal a hot ground to be dark against and it never resolves into scenery.

Creatures like this were kept in pits under the floors of people who found a use for them, fed through a trapdoor when a guest became inconvenient. Painting one roaring against red rather than chained in a cell keeps it an animal instead of a prop. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the companion study with the claws bared in its pit and the court that kept one downstairs.