Alexstrasza Holding Her Dragon-Topped Staff — Print & Oil Painting

The background here is a single sustained magenta and it is doing something unusual: it is darker than the figure standing in front of it. Brightness on this canvas is among the lowest of the fifty while the colour reading is high, which means the whole picture is deep pink held at low light, with large blurred wing and limb shapes moving behind her that are never brought into focus.

The staff runs the full height of the frame at the left. Gold, plain along the shaft, it opens at the top into a finial of curved blades arranged like a head with red stones set between them, and she holds it upright in the left hand without leaning on it. It is carried the way a standard is carried rather than the way a walking stick is.

Her other hand rests on the hip, and the gauntlet there ends in a small gold dragon-head fitting at the wrist. The armour repeats the design of the other paintings of her, red and gold over white and navy, with a scarlet cloak hanging from the shoulders down the right side of the picture in one unbroken fall.

The hair is the loosest passage in the image, painted in long wet strokes of crimson and rust that break up at the ends and merge into the haze behind. Against all that heat the face is kept cool and almost expressionless, and the eyes are the only part of it given a hard edge.

Her consort worked a day job for several hundred years. One of the red flight took a mortal shape, moved into a floating human city of mages, took a human name and a seat in its councils, and advised generations of archmages who never once suspected what was sitting at the table with them. It is the least dramatic long-term operation in this collection and probably the most effective. A portrait that hands her a staff and a diplomat's posture rather than a weapon belongs to that side of the family. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the citadel of the floating city he lived and worked in and the same queen airborne with a spear in hand.