Prince Arthas Menethil Under a Full Moon — Print & Oil Painting

The moon is a flat white disc and it has been placed at the upper left, unmodelled, without a single crater on it, so that it reads as a hole cut in the sky rather than as a light. Everything else in the picture is lit from somewhere else entirely, which gives the whole canvas its slightly staged, theatrical unease.

He is armoured in silver, blue and gold, and it is ceremonial work: a lion's head cast into the right pauldron, filigree along every edge, moulded faces on the knees, a tabard falling straight to the ankle. Both hands carry a heavy warhammer horizontally across the body at hip height, its head a plain gold block, held the way a man holds a tool he has not decided to use.

The face has been given nothing to do. Blond hair to the jaw, clean shaven, mouth closed, eyes forward and calm. He is painted as a young prince in a portrait, not as a fighter mid-scene, and the calm is what makes the bottom of the picture land.

Because the bottom of the picture is a heap of the dead. Bodies lie tangled across the whole foreground in armour and rags, a bare skull sits at the right corner beside a broken shield, and a clawed hand reaches up out of the pile. Behind him a gothic city stands in fog with domed roofs and pointed spires, unlit.

This is the version of him with the hammer still in his hands, which places the portrait before the worst decision of his life: the day he ordered a plague-struck city of his father's subjects put to the sword on the argument that they were already dead. The picture puts the corpses at his feet and the calm on his face, and lets the viewer do the arithmetic. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside a paladin of the same order defending a burning village and what he becomes, standing beside a pale horse.