Yennefer Vengerberg Before a Glowing Pentagram — Print & Oil Painting

Start with the straw hat. It lies in the foreground on the spread of her skirt, wide-brimmed, coiled from plaited straw in visible concentric rings, and it is the most ordinary object anywhere in the picture: a thing for keeping the sun off in a field. Everything above it is a scene of sorcery in a dark room.

The wall behind carries a five-pointed star inside a circle, cut into the stone at a scale of two or three feet across, lit from nowhere in particular so that it registers as a faint pale ghost rather than a burning sign. Fainter tracery surrounds it, and the whole upper corner of the canvas fades out before the shape is complete.

Between the sign and the hat stands a figure in white and black. The top is a simple sleeveless shift, cream, the brightest area in the frame; the skirt below is heavy dark blue lace spreading across the full width of the picture and dissolving into fog at both edges. A band of stacked leather plates covers one forearm.

She leans on a broken fluted column at the right, and at the tips of the fingers resting on it a small blue flame is burning, no bigger than a candle, throwing a cold light up the stone and onto her wrist. That flame and the star are the only two pieces of evidence the picture offers, and neither of them is emphatic.

Grey smoke does the rest. It rolls in from the left, crosses the floor, softens the base of the column and swallows a thin dark upright standing further back, keeping the whole image inside a narrow band of value. From our The Witcher collection, alongside the loosely painted portrait with blue light at both hands for the same magic at a far larger scale.