Stormtroopers Patrol a Sunlit Desert Marketplace — Print & Oil Painting

The unusual thing about this painting is where it puts the viewer. We are standing in the market, at the shoulder of a tall droid whose back fills the right quarter of the canvas: dusty rose plating, a rounded skull, one round photoreceptor just visible as the head turns. We are behind it, looking past it, and the troopers coming up the lane have not looked at us.

The lane itself is beautifully organised. Mud-brick walls on both sides push the perspective to a bright vanishing point; awnings and a run of hanging lamps close the top of the frame; and the whole street is lit by a hot, low sun that turns every surface ochre, apricot and burnt sienna. On the left a stall is stacked with clay jars, bowls, baskets and a battered kettle, with a thread of steam rising from a cooking pot.

Two stormtroopers walk toward us down the centre, blasters held across the body, the leading one wearing a dusty orange shoulder pauldron. They are painted in exactly the same warm dust as the walls, which is the picture's quietest and best decision: the armour is white in principle and filthy in practice, and it has been in this heat long enough to match it.

Everyone else is going about their day. A robed figure in cream stands further up the lane, a thin spindly droid picks its way across the middle distance, and nobody in the frame is running. The Empire appears here not as a battle but as two men with rifles walking through a place where people are trying to sell pots.

Held in our Star Wars collection. The same desert world, emptied of its crowds and seen from a ridge at sunset, is painted in the Kenobi landscape.