Triss Merigold Kneeling in Candlelight — Print & Oil Painting

Light is the subject here. A stand of five or six candles burns behind her on the right; a deep red drape on the left takes that light and throws it back warm. The room is lit from both edges, which leaves the centre of the canvas as its darkest part and puts a soft glow round everything at the margins.

The setting has been furnished with care and is worth reading. A bed with a heavy carved headboard and a turned wooden finial, cream pillows, a pale rumpled coverlet, a framed picture hanging on the plaster above, and that red curtain falling the full height of the left edge in heavy folds. It is a real room in a real inn, not a studio backdrop.

Colour is where the composition is actually decided. Everything in the picture is warm: red, ochre, cream, gold, candle-yellow. One thing is not, and that is the teal of the lace, the single cool note in the whole canvas, which is why the eye goes to it first no matter where it enters.

She kneels upright with her weight back on her heels, hands loose, shoulders dropped, head slightly bowed and the eyes closed. Red hair swept back from the temple with a gold and blue star-shaped ornament pinned into it, long drop earrings, a small green stone at the throat. Nothing about the pose is addressed to the viewer.

It is the stillest painting in the group and the only one where a mage is doing nothing at all. Part of our The Witcher collection, and the paired composition with Yennefer puts her back in company.