Geralt Overlooks a Lake and Green Hills — Print & Oil Painting

This is a physical painting that has been photographed, and the evidence is all over the surface. Ridges of loaded paint stand up along the cloud edges, the tooth of the support shows through the thinner passages of sky, and a strip of bare white ground has been left round three sides like the margin of a study. The artist has signed the lower left corner.

Half the canvas is sky and it is an unapologetic blue. Cumulus is dragged across it in thick white with grey undersides, and two or three thin cirrus streaks have been scratched in higher up. Nothing about the handling is subtle, and the picture is better for it.

Below, the land is built from flat greens: rounded hills in three or four tones, a lake at the left with two dark crags standing out of it, a cluster of houses with orange roofs in the middle distance, a mass of purple lupins on the left of the path and a yellow flowering shrub on the right. A dry stone wall stacked with red pantiles closes the right foreground.

The figure stands where the track crests, seen from behind, and he is painted with exactly the same directness as the houses: a black silhouette of armour, a white topknot, two hilts crossed on his back, no rendering at all. He is not more important than the lupins, and that is a deliberate choice.

The whole thing belongs to a tradition of plain, cheerful landscape that the source material rarely gets, and it makes an unusual companion piece on a wall of dark oils. Part of our The Witcher collection, alongside the valley and its hilltop castle for the same view painted at dusk in half the colours.