Geralt Battles a Werewolf in a Misty Forest — Print & Oil Painting

Dead trunks run floor to ceiling through this canvas like the bars of a cage, and the whole fight has been staged behind them. There is no sky, no ground line and no depth cue except fog, so the eye has nothing to hold on to but three open mouths.

They are set at three heights and they read as one rising line. Lowest and largest, at the bottom left, a shaggy wolf-bodied beast with its jaws stretched wide, teeth bared, saliva breaking off the lower lip in threads. Behind and above it, a second one, mane bristling, muzzle wrinkled back. Highest, at the top centre, the man, mouth open in very nearly the same shape as theirs.

His body is committed. He drives forward off the back foot, torso rotated, the right arm swept down and back with the fist closed, white hair whipped up into a tail that streams behind him. The chainmail and the brown leather have been painted quickly, in long strokes, and the drawing gets looser the further it is from his face.

The one piece of hard information is at the lower right: a blade angled down through the reeds with a bright red smear running the length of it. Nothing in the picture is beginning. Something has already been opened up, and the second animal has not yet decided what to do about that.

The palette is a single blue-grey with the contrast held deliberately low, so the blood is the only saturated mark anywhere. From our The Witcher collection, alongside the blue canvas where he reaches for the hilt before a spectral beast and the fight has not started at all.