Grommash Hellscream Seated Among Chains and Skulls — Print & Oil Painting

Look at the floor before you look at the orc. Lying on its side at the bottom of the frame, at his feet, is a carved stone head wearing a crown: a broad human face with closed eyes, snapped off at the neck, resting in a dark smear of red on pale flagstones. Nobody in the picture is acknowledging it and it is the most articulate thing in the room.

Above it he sits on a heavy timber seat with his forearms laid along its arms and his knees apart. The skin is a dull brown, not green, the black hair is bound up into a topknot with the sides shaved, and the right shoulder carries a broad white plate marked with three red chevrons. Fur is bunched under the elbows and a plain leather kilt hangs to the knee.

The ceiling is made of chains. Two of them cross the top of the canvas from wall to wall with hooks, cleavers and blade fragments hung along their length, and behind the throne a red drape falls in heavy folds. A spear leans in at the right and a great pale tusk curves up beside the seat.

The whole thing is lit by one warm source above and slightly behind, which bleaches the top of the head and the near shoulder and drops everything below the waist into brown shadow. The measured brightness sits near the bottom of the range for the five paintings of him, and the saturation is carried almost entirely by that red drape and the marks on the floor.

His clan spent those years outdoors. When the wars ended and the defeated orcs were fenced into camps, this one and the fighters who followed him were among the very few who were never taken; they lived rough in enemy forests for years, hunted, while every orc behind wire sank into a torpor that no beating and no argument could reach. He could not wake them and he would not join them. A portrait of a chieftain sitting under somebody else's chains with a broken crown at his feet has caught the position exactly. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same chieftain on a throne built out of tusks and his son seated beneath a red banner on a throne of his own.