Geralt Rides Toward a Weathered Wooden Mill — Print & Oil Painting

There is almost no colour in this picture, and the measurement bears that out: what looks like a grey landscape really is one, a grey-white scale with a thin wash of straw and a little cold blue in the shadows. It behaves like a wash drawing that has had a single warm glaze dropped over the field.

The building is the subject, not the rider. A tall tapering timber tower stands on the right, clad in boards that have gone silver with weather, roofed in split shingles, with a small pointed door at its foot and a cross-braced frame at the head. A low thatched outbuilding leans against its far side and a leaning post stands in front.

The horseman is a scale figure and nothing more. He walks a dark horse across the middle distance at the left, white hair and two hilts just legible, no bigger than the door of the mill he is heading for. Give him another thirty seconds and he will be behind the trees.

The rest of the canvas is weather and dry brush. Skeletal trees at the left with a few pale leaves left on them, a run of rail fence, tall dead grass across the whole foreground scratched in with a stiff brush, and a grey sky spilling several dozen birds out of the top of the frame.

Held in our The Witcher collection. The thatched village at warm evening is the same countryside with the colour turned back on.