Geralt Battles a Griffin in a Golden Field — Print & Oil Painting

Colour has been restricted here almost to a monochrome. Ochre, honey, umber and a dull gold run through the sky, the grass, the feathers and the armour alike, and the only cool note anywhere is a thin grey-blue in the cloud at the top. Removing colour from a fight is a risk, and here it pays: with hue out of the way, the picture is entirely about mass.

The beast has been arranged as a loop around the man. One enormous wing sweeps up from the right edge and out across the top of the canvas, the body and haunch fill the bottom right corner, and the shoulder and head close the left, so that the figure is standing inside a ring of animal with no exit drawn anywhere.

The head is at the lower left: eagle-shaped, the beak wide open, the tongue visible, one amber eye set in dark plumage. The sword goes straight into that opening. He is in a full lunge with both hands on the grip, the back leg extended and locked, white hair thrown forward over the brow, tan plate and leather taking a hard rim of light along the near arm.

A griffin is an awkward thing to draw, because it asks the painter to join a bird to a cat and make the seam invisible. The solution here is to hide the join under the wing entirely: you get a raptor's head and a mammal's haunch and never quite see where one becomes the other. Higher up, a second one is flying in the pale sky, small and unhurried.

From our The Witcher collection. For the same sort of encounter at the other end, with the wings already down in the grass, see Vesemir over a winged beast in the reeds.