Bolvar Fordragon Standing Amid Battle Smoke — Print & Oil Painting

The painting has been left as a sketch and it is much stronger for it. Highlights are laid on as single unblended strokes of white and pale grey, the edges of the pauldrons are drawn rather than modelled, and whole passages of the cloak are one flat colour. Nothing has been gone over twice, and the surface still shows the order in which it was made.

A gold lion fills the centre of the breastplate. It is the most finished object in the picture: a full face with a mane worked in radiating locks, framed by a blue field, and everything else on the armour, the shoulder guards, the tassets, the gorget, is arranged symmetrically around it in green-gold and steel.

He stands square to us with his head slightly lowered and both eyes in shadow, white-grey hair falling to the shoulders, mouth set. In his left hand a long sword hangs point down and slightly forward, its blade catching a hard white line along the edge. He is not raising it and he is not resting on it.

Behind him there is only weather. Smoke fills the whole background in warm greys and browns, thickest at the right, thinning to almost white at the upper left, with no ground, no horizon and no second figure. The cloak drops away into the same murk, so the man is standing in a hole in the picture.

Before any of the later disasters, this was a career soldier who ran a kingdom for somebody else. With the king missing he held the regency and looked after the heir, which is an unglamorous job usually given to men who will not use it, and he did not use it. A portrait of him in full ceremonial plate, unfinished at the edges, with a lion on his chest and nothing at all behind him, has caught the right man. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the same knight praying in radiant light and the gate of the city he governed, opening onto a glowing horizon.