Dwarf Warrior Gripping a Massive Hammer — Print & Oil Painting

He has planted the hammer and leaned on it, and the picture is built on that one line of transferred weight. The head of the thing rests on the floor at the bottom of the frame, a squared block of black steel; the haft rises through the composition at a slight angle; both gauntlets are stacked on it at chest height, and the shoulders press down onto the hands. Nothing is being lifted.

The forge behind him is the reason the picture is warm. A trough of molten metal glows orange in the lower left corner, sparks drift up through the whole frame, and heavy chains hang from somewhere above at the left edge. The vault around it is nearly black. Brightness here is among the lowest in the lot and almost every lit surface in the painting has been lit by that trough.

The armour is a working suit rather than a ceremonial one: dark plate with gold rims and small red cabochons at the shoulder and knee, sabatons the size of anvils, and a broad band around each forearm. White fur bunches at the wrists and the collar. A red cloak lifts behind the left shoulder and is painted as one flat unbroken shape.

The face is set into the picture like a stone in a wall. A great white beard falls to the chest in three combed masses, the moustache hangs past the jaw, the brows are down and the mouth is closed. He is not shouting, which in a collection full of open mouths is itself a decision.

One mountain, three clans, and it went badly. The dwarves fell out among themselves over who would hold the hold, fought a war about it, and finished with the winners keeping the forge, one loser exiled north to the crags where they took up gryphons, and the other driven south underground where their own sorcerer tried to settle the account by summoning something out of the fire that killed him and enslaved the survivors. A portrait of a dwarf standing over a lit trough with a hammer he is not swinging belongs to the clan that kept the forge. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with another of his people roaring alongside a bear and the towers of that hold weathering a mountain snowstorm.