Geralt Walks Beneath a Misty Countryside Tree — Print & Oil Painting

An old tree leans in from the left edge and takes the picture over. Its trunk rises on a long diagonal, splits, and throws a canopy of thin branches right across the top of the frame, and the leaves are painted in small separated touches of green and gold so that daylight comes through the gaps in patches.

Below and beyond it, everything dissolves. A pale blue-green haze fills the middle distance until the cliff walls on the right are pure tone with no drawing in them at all, a distant spire on the horizon is reduced to a single vertical mark, and a mossy roof half-way down the left has almost finished being swallowed.

A rust-coloured track comes up from the bottom left and bends into the centre, and the figure is walking up it toward us: small, silver-haired, one arm hanging with the sword still in the hand, the other side of him lost against the dark of the trunk. He is perhaps a fifteenth of the height of the canvas.

The foreground is where the brush gets specific again. Individual grass blades in fresh green along the lower right, a fallen branch, a broken fence rail, red flecks in the leaf litter. It is a classic depth device, sharp at your feet and soft at the horizon, and it is handled here with unusual patience.

From our The Witcher collection, near the valley walk toward a hilltop castle, where the same lone walker is given mountains instead of a tree.