Anduin Lothar with His Gryphon Companion — Print & Oil Painting

Two heads, one frame, and the composition refuses to say which of them is the subject. The man fills the left half in three-quarter view, looking straight out at us; the bird fills the right, in profile, beak parted, its eye level with his. They are the same size on the canvas, which is a decision rather than an accident of perspective.

The animal has been painted as a real raptor. Cream and grey feather groups run back over the skull in graded rows, the beak is heavy and hooked with a visible nostril, and the neck feathers lift into a ruff where they meet the shoulder. Nothing about it is stylised except the size.

His armour is blue enamel over steel with gold scrollwork thrown across the chest and shoulder in long curves, and the gauntlet resting at the bottom of the frame carries three pale blue stones set in a band. Long dark hair, a full beard, a red cloak lifting behind: the paint on him is smooth and cool where the bird's is dry and broken.

The air between them is full of debris. Small dark embers and pale seed heads drift across the whole picture, catching light at every depth, and the background burns from smoky grey at the left to a hot orange sky at the right. Two thin stalks of dry grass cross the lower corners.

Winged mounts of this kind belong to a specific people in this world: the mountain dwarf clan whose riders brought their gryphons into the war and gave the alliance the only cavalry that could operate above a valley. Pairing one with this particular commander is the artist's arrangement rather than a scene from the histories, and it works because both of them are being painted as veterans of the same campaign. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between a winged rider soaring toward the dwarven capital's gates and the same man standing before his assembled army.