Geralt Holds Gwent Cards With a Bloody Scratch — Print & Oil Painting

Three cards, held up fanned in a studded black glove at the bottom of the frame, gold-backed and stamped with a small sunburst device in the corner. They are pushed close to the viewer and slightly out of focus, which is exactly how a hand of cards looks to the person holding it.

Above them, the face tells you what the last hour was like. Three parallel red lines cross the right temple and cheek, fresh and still wet at the lower end, and a matching smear of red has dried on the wrapped grip of the sword rising behind his shoulder. Nothing else in the picture is red at all.

The sequencing is the joke, and it is a dry one. Something clawed him across the face, he dealt with it, and now he is sitting in a tavern with a bad hand and no intention of showing it. The eyebrows are slightly raised, the mouth is closed and flat, and the yellow eyes look straight down the lens.

Everything around all this has been suppressed. The background is a single cool grey with a suggestion of vapour in it, the armour is black studded leather with a spiked bracer at the wrist, and there is no room, no table, no opponent. The card game the third game let loose across every inn on the Continent is represented here by three pieces of gilt card and one man's expression.

From our The Witcher collection. For the same figure with the day's work behind him and nothing in his hands, see the night-wood portrait, crouched beside a planted sword.