Lambert's Classical Portrait With Cat Eyes — Print & Oil Painting

Every formal decision here belongs to a seventeenth-century workshop. Flat olive-brown ground with no setting in it, three-quarter bust turned slightly left, light entering from the upper left, no props, no landscape through a window. Painted at that size and hung in a corridor it would pass for a portrait of a minor merchant.

The handling holds up the impersonation. Skin built in warm translucent layers with the cool grey of the shaved jaw showing through underneath, a wet highlight on the lower lip, the stubble suggested by tone rather than drawn hair by hair, and the white of the standing collar laid in as one confident wedge against the black coat and its red lining.

Then there are the eyes, and they undo the whole polite arrangement. Amber-gold irises with vertical slot pupils, wet, catching the same light as the lip, set in a face that is otherwise entirely ordinary. Once you have seen them the portrait reorganises itself around them: this is not a merchant.

A pale scar runs from the hairline down through the left brow and onto the cheek, old and healed flat. The hair has receded off a high forehead, the neck is thick, the mouth is slightly open, and the expression is somewhere between challenge and boredom.

Lambert trained at Kaer Morhen alongside Geralt and Eskel and is the one with the worst temper and the sourest tongue of the three, which makes the choice of a dignified portrait format quietly funny. From our The Witcher collection, and the portrait of Vesemir with his blade drawn gives you the man who taught him.