Ciri Wears a Kimono Beneath Red Maple Leaves — Print & Oil Painting

The costume comes from somewhere else entirely and the picture makes no attempt to hide it. A kimono in deep saffron worn off both shoulders, collared in black silk printed with yellow flowers, closed by a black obi with a gold cord knotted at the front. A character has been lifted out of her own world and dressed in another one.

Behind her the maples are a single flat mass of red, high-keyed and almost graphic, with two pale rays cutting down through it from the upper left. Below the branch line everything goes cold at once: a grey-blue lake, a low pale ridge on the far side, and separate red leaves falling across the water. Warm above, cool below, divided by one hard horizontal.

The hair is put up in a loose bun under a small gold-topped cap, with a gilt comb on either side trailing long strands of chain almost to the shoulder. The eyes are green, the cheeks flushed high, and a pale pendant hangs at the throat on a fine chain. The scar the character usually carries is not part of this reading, which leaves the ash-white hair and those eyes to do the identifying on their own.

She holds something slim and black low at her side, flat against the silk and tapering to a point below her hand: a closed fan, or a sheathed short blade. The painting declines to settle which, and leaves it as the one hard edge in a figure otherwise built from curves.

The colour runs hotter here than in almost anything around it, and it is carried by two notes only, the saffron and the red, with the whole rest of the surface falling back into blue-grey. You will find it in our The Witcher collection, close to Ciri's painted portrait against grey shadow for the same face out of armour, and Ciri sitting with a wolf spirit and a raven for another portrait with the fighting put away.