Geralt Rides Toward a Sunset Castle Spire — Print & Oil Painting

Proportion is the first decision here and everything else follows from it. This is a long horizontal band, well over twice as wide as it is tall, which leaves no room for a foreground and forces the whole scene into a strip across the middle of the wall.

Below the horizon nothing keeps its local colour. Horse, rider, ridge, dead branches, the birds and a low animal rooting about on the right are all reduced to one flat brown-black, cut cleanly out of the light behind them. You are given outlines and nothing else, and the outlines are enough.

All the information is in the sky. A heavy cloud mass rolls across the top of the frame, ragged at its lower edge; below it a warm break of orange and gold with the sun sitting low and pale inside it; and the two are separated by a band of grey that gets bluer as it moves left. The light is behind the rider and slightly to his right.

Far off on the left, a pale spire lifts out of the haze with a scatter of smaller towers beneath it, drawn faintly enough that it could be an hour away or a day. The rider sits upright, cloak hanging dead straight, two hilts above his shoulders, and the horse has one hoof lifted. Nothing is hurrying.

Part of our The Witcher collection. Compare the other ride, toward a weathered mill, where Roach is painted rather than silhouetted, and the misty citadel with a turquoise portal at its foot for the same journey arriving somewhere.