Thrawn Wearing His Ceremonial Chain of Office — Print & Oil Painting

The background is doing something unusual for a portrait: it is burning. A field of smoky orange-red fills the whole rectangle behind him, dropping to near black in the corners and torn through with a few hard black scratches, and none of it describes a place. It is a colour chosen for contrast, and the contrast is total. Blue skin against hot orange, with nothing in between.

The chain is the subject. It hangs in two loops across his chest and carries a dozen small objects: a five-pointed star, a plain disc, a triangle, a ring, several irregular medallions, a slim blade-shaped pendant hanging lower than the rest. No two are alike, the spacing is uneven, and they sit at slightly different depths. It reads as an accumulation rather than as designed regalia.

The tunic is a dull olive-grey rather than the white he usually wears, with heavy gold bars set square on both shoulders and a broad gold buckle at the waist. Wear has been painted into the cloth in dry scrubbed strokes. Measured saturation sits under a third, so the metal ends up as the only bright thing anywhere on the body.

His hands are clasped low in front of him, fingers interlaced, completely still. The face above is composed to the edge of blankness: mouth level, jaw loose, the red eyes lit from inside and aimed straight out at us. The painter has allowed him no gesture and no expression, and has put every ounce of the picture's ornament below the neck.

That is a fair reading of the man. He climbed to the top of a service that did not want him in it, on results rather than on charm, and a chest of assorted honours collected from assorted places is exactly the residue such a career leaves behind. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to the brooding study of him hung with scattered trinkets and the close portrait of that red stare.