Simba and Mufasa Overlook the Pride Lands — Print & Oil Painting

The proportion is extreme, close to two and a half times as wide as it is tall, and nearly all of it is spent on empty country. A plain of ochre and rust runs from edge to edge, cut by a river that loops back on itself three times and catches the light as one thin bright ribbon.

The figures are pushed into the far right and kept small. A full-grown male with a deep red-brown mane stands at the lip of a rock shelf, tail hanging, head turned out over the plain; a cub sits below and ahead of him, ears up, looking the same way. Neither is drawn in the flat line of the animated film. They are painted as lions, with real weight under the coat and a rendered shadow on the stone.

The sun is a soft white disc low on the left, held in a horizontal band of gold that fades up through orange into a bar of grey cloud along the top edge. Dozens of birds are flicked in as short dark commas, thickest near the rock and thinning as they cross the sky.

All the drama sits in the gap between the two animals and the horizon, which is most of the canvas: inheritance drawn as distance. From our The Lion King collection, where that same outcrop turns up crowded with the whole court in Mufasa, Simba, and Rafiki on Pride Rock.