Arthas Menethil Planting Frostmourne in Snow — Print & Oil Painting

The cloak is the biggest shape in the painting and it is horizontal. It leaves his shoulders and streams away to the right in one continuous dark mass, edge lifted, filling nearly a third of the canvas and running off the frame without ever showing where it ends. Wind is doing all the composing here, and it blows from left to right through the entire picture.

He himself is narrow, vertical and small in all that space. Both gauntlets rest on the pommel of the sword, whose point is buried in the snow at his feet, and his head is tipped forward under the horned helm so that only two pale slits of eye light show. The plate is rendered in cold greys with a fur mantle at the hips and skulls worked into the knee and belt.

The land gives him nothing. A flat white plain runs back to a horizon that is barely a horizon, with a faint blue-green ruin at the far left and a few black splinters of masonry at the right, all of it half dissolved in falling snow. The sky is a single graded blue-black. There is no path, no camp and no second figure anywhere.

The colour discipline is severe: blue-black, slate, bone, and one cold cyan used three times only, on the eye slits, on a rune at the hip and along the top edge of the blade. Brightness sits low across the whole canvas and the snow itself is painted grey rather than white.

What is missing from the picture is the reason it works. The army this figure commands is the largest thing in that part of the world, raised out of the populations of two kingdoms and quartered in a fortress the dead built themselves, and none of it is shown. He is standing on an empty plain because he does not need to be near any of it to move it. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the same figure with the blade lit like a lamp and the spire of that fortress standing under the aurora.