Geralt and Dandelion Overlook a Misty Valley — Print & Oil Painting

Two people appear in this landscape and between them they occupy perhaps a thousandth of it. One stands at the tip of a flat tongue of rock jutting out into space at the upper left; the other sits on a lower spur in the right foreground with a knee drawn up. Both are facing the same way, out into the valley.

What they are looking at is built in receding planes of blue-green. Four or five ranges of peaks, each one paler and less detailed than the last, a lake or a river catching a band of gold light in the middle distance, and what may be a small walled settlement on a ridge halfway out, drawn with about six brushstrokes. Cloud presses down across the top of the frame and a thin line of sunset breaks through on the far left.

At this scale neither figure carries any identifying detail at all. One is a tan silhouette, the other a rust-red one, and the names in the title are supplied by the picture's context rather than by anything the paint can tell you. That is standard practice in landscape of this kind: the figures are there to establish how big the mountains are, and they do the job well.

The two rock platforms are the real composition. They are the only hard-edged, dark, near objects in a canvas that is otherwise all haze, and they sit diagonally opposite each other so that the eye crosses the valley twice, once out along the high ledge and once back along the low one.

Part of our The Witcher collection. For the bard at a distance where you can actually see him, see Dandelion playing his lute at a mountain picnic.