Philippa Eilhart Confronts Knights in Flowing Red — Print & Oil Painting

A long banner of red cloth streams off her shoulder and out to the left across a full third of the canvas, twisting as it goes. It is the only saturated colour in the picture and it functions less like a garment than like a single enormous brushstroke laid across a grey wall.

The wall behind is dressed ashlar, courses of grey-brown block with an arched opening at the top left and a black recess to the right, and the whole architecture has been kept flat and unlit so that nothing draws attention. Armed men wait in the shadow at the far left with only their helmets and spear shafts catching anything.

The action is small and precise. Her right arm is extended toward the armoured figure on the right, and where her hand ends and his visor begins there is a single blue-white flare no bigger than a coin. His head has just started to go back. In her other hand, held low and half hidden in the skirt, she is holding a small blue vial.

The odds are set out plainly. A kneeling knight in gold-brown mail on the left, a standing one in blue-black plate on the right, more shapes behind, all of them armoured and armed; and in the middle a woman in a gown, unprotected, not moving her feet. The composition puts her at the exact centre and makes her the calmest thing in it.

The skirt is painted with long dragged verticals in coral and rust that pool into deeper red at the hem, and it takes up as much canvas as both knights together. Part of our The Witcher collection. The blindfolded portrait with an owl feather shows the same woman after a confrontation of this kind went badly.