Foltest's Ghostly Portrait Amid Bare Branches — Print & Oil Painting

Only one colour has been allowed into this canvas: a cold grey-green, run from near-white through to almost black, with nothing warm anywhere to relieve it. The effect is of a photograph left too long in the developer, or of a face seen through frozen glass.

The head has been treated as carved stone that somebody forgot to bring indoors. The crown is chipped along its rim and topped with a lily finial; the surface of the cheeks and brow is pitted and granular; and two long fissures run down from the inner corners of both eyes to the jawline, following precisely the tracks that tears would take. The artist never says the statue is weeping. The cracks simply happen to be in that position.

The eyes are the exception to the stone. They are painted wet, with a catchlight in each, and they look straight out of the frame. Everything above and below them is mineral; that narrow band across the middle of the face is alive, and the contradiction is the whole picture.

Around the head the wood is bare. Thin black branches cross the frame at every angle, a tangle of thorn gathers at the right edge, and fog fills the intervals so that nothing has a hard outline. A fur mantle closes the bottom of the composition in heavy vertical folds.

Temeria under this king was the strongest of the Northern Kingdoms, and it is worth noticing how completely that has been drained out of the image: no army, no banners, no hall. From our The Witcher collection. The battlement portrait, cup raised over his massed troops shows the man while he still had all of it.