Geralt Draws His Sword in a Burning Village — Print & Oil Painting

You are standing behind him and close, near enough that his shoulder crowds the left edge of the frame and you are effectively inside his shadow. Everything you see, you see past him.

The fire is the only light source in the picture, and it is doing all the drawing. A house at the centre is fully alight with flame going up through the roof timbers; a second roof burns behind it on the right; a low line of fire runs along the ground between them. Everything in front of that light has been reduced to black shape, and everything behind it is orange smoke.

Out in the middle distance, standing in the burning street, are two or three dark figures. They are not running and they are not fighting. The paint gives them height, an outline and nothing else, and the picture is careful never to tell you what they are, which is the most uncomfortable thing in it.

The gesture is caught one beat early. His right hand is up over the shoulder with the fingers already closed on the grip, and the blade has not yet come out of the scabbard along his back. Long hair, a heavy cloak hanging straight, no armour visible from this angle.

The foreground is deliberately unresolved: burnt stubble, a fallen beam, dark debris, a few loose embers drifting up. In a canvas this wide it functions as an approach, a strip of scorched ground you have to cross before the picture starts. From our The Witcher collection, and the force blast thrown in the same firelight is very probably the next thing that happens.