Arthas Menethil Beside His Pale Warhorse — Print & Oil Painting

Two heads, and the one on the right is an animal. The king fills the centre and left of a wide frame, seen from the chest up, while a pale horse in plated barding comes in from the right with its muzzle almost touching his shoulder. A second armoured horse head appears at the lower left, cropped and darker. The composition is a portrait with a stable in it.

The gesture is the whole picture. His left hand is raised and laid flat on the near animal's cheek plate, fingers spread, the arm relaxed. It is the ordinary thing a rider does to settle a horse, painted here by a figure whose armour carries three separate skulls, and the mismatch between the hand and the costume is exactly what the artist is after.

White hair blows across his face in long strands, lifted from the left, and behind it the eyes are two flat glares of cyan under a heavy brow. The plate is grey steel gone slightly green, with frost or rime settled into the joints, and a wolf head moulded on the pauldron.

Everything behind is weather. Blue-white cloud, drifting ice crystals, a suggestion of a slope at the left, and no horizon at all. The paint is smooth in the metal and dry in the mane, which is the only textural contrast in the picture.

The horse has a name and a history longer than most of the human characters. He rode it as a boy, it broke its legs in the snow and he had to end it himself, and years later he came back with the sword and raised it to carry him again. A portrait built around a hand resting on that animal's face is doing something much colder than sentiment. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same king rallying his army beneath a full moon and the boy he was, in gold armour before any of it.