Yennefer Vengerberg Amid Autumn Leaves — Print & Oil Painting

The wood behind her has been dissolved on purpose. Enough drawing survives to read a branch across the top of the frame and a few leaf shapes near the edges, but the rest is a field of ochre, apricot and cream with no depth in it, working as a warm ground rather than as a place.

All of that light arrives from behind. It runs a bright edge down both sides of the hair, turns the loose strands at the temples into single lit filaments and catches the top of the near shoulder, while the front of the face is left to a soft, much cooler fill. The head ends up sitting slightly forward of its own background.

Against so much warmth the eyes are the coldest thing on the canvas. They are a clear violet under lids shadowed in the same colour, and they have been kept sharper than anything else here, so at any size the picture resolves to those two points first.

The rest is handled softly and fast: dark waves worked in long strokes with the direction of the brush left visible, a mouth built from three or four wet highlights, a lilac ribbon at the throat carrying a small pale star, and a bare shoulder crossed by one pale strap where the bodice starts at the bottom edge.

Autumn does something particular for her. This is the one portrait of the sorceress in our The Witcher collection painted in daylight and in warm colour, and set beside the violet-eyed stare in the dark it reads almost like a different climate.