A Sith Commander Leads Troopers Into Battle — Print & Oil Painting

The whole composition hangs off one pointing arm. It comes out of the right side of the canvas fully extended, gauntlet gleaming, the index finger straight, and it crosses the frame at exactly the height of the horizon. Every other diagonal in the picture is arranged to run underneath it.

The man giving the order is painted with unusual coldness. The skull is hairless and the skin is a bloodless grey, drawn tight over the cheekbones, with the eyes set deep enough to lose their whites. His plate is black, ribbed at the abdomen, fitted with a heavy circular disc at the sternum and a red panel beside it, and the seams of the armour glow faintly along their length.

His blade drops from the right hip to the bottom left corner as one uninterrupted crimson bar with a white core. It is not raised and it is not aimed. Holding it low while the other arm does the work is what makes the figure read as a commander rather than a duellist.

Behind him the battle is staged in receding tiers: a landing craft with black angular wings settling through the smoke, a second robed and masked figure striding forward with a red blade of his own, then rank upon rank of troopers in bulbous blast helmets, and at the far left edge two green blades still lit in the hands of somebody losing. Fires burn along the bottom of the frame and the sky is the colour of rust.

This is the Sith Empire of the Old Republic, thousands of years before the Clone Wars, in an era when the dark side commanded uniformed armies and fought the Republic in open daylight rather than through proxies. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the Republic soldiers of the same era standing guard and the emblem those armies marched under.