Anduin Lothar at the Standing Stones — Print & Oil Painting

A lion is sitting on his shoulder. The left pauldron has been made as a full golden lion's head with a mane worked in overlapping metal leaves, jaws closed, staring out of the canvas, and it is rendered with more care than the man's own face. The other shoulder carries a plain steel plate, so the asymmetry is deliberate and the eye keeps going back to the animal.

Here he is old. Bald across the crown, a full white beard cut square, heavy brows, skin worked in warm greys: a commander at the end rather than in his prime. He wears white and gold plate over a deep blue tabard with a red cloak thrown back, and a medallion hangs at his throat on a short chain.

The sword is planted. A long blade with a gilded crossguard and a wrapped grip stands point down in the grass in front of him, both hands resting on the pommel, the fuller catching a thin line of light along its whole length. It divides the lower half of the picture and props the figure up.

The setting is doing something unusual for this collection. Behind him, in blue-grey mist, stand the uprights and lintels of a stone circle, weathered and roughly dressed, with green hills beyond them. There is no city, no banner and no army. The paint is soft and cool everywhere except on the armour.

He did not die of old age. After holding an alliance together through a long defensive war he was killed at the foot of a mountain fortress in single combat with the orc warchief, who expected the news to break the army and instead handed it a reason. A portrait of him leaning on a grounded sword among older monuments than his own kingdom is a picture about what gets left standing. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the warchief who killed him, standing in a blazing dusk and the same commander painted with a gryphon at his shoulder.