A Winged Rider Soars Toward Ironforge's Gates — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours that do not belong together have been stacked one above the other here, and it is the most striking decision in the Ironforge group. The upper half is hot rose and magenta: sky, cloud and the whole mountain face carved with its gate. The lower half is cold blue: a field of jagged ice forms, drifts and shadowed rock stepping away toward the bottom edge. The line where they meet is a bank of white haze that explains nothing.

The gate up in the pink is drawn as a flat frontal facade, symmetrical, with a tall arched opening at its centre glowing slightly warmer than the stone around it, square pylons rising either side, and further structures stepping away along the ledge to the left. It has been painted with the same rough dry brush as the mountain behind, so the architecture and the rock read as one material.

A pale road climbs out of the blue and up toward that arch, curving from the bottom left through the ice field, and it is the only continuous line joining the two halves of the picture. Snow falls across the whole surface as small white flecks, distributed evenly rather than in drifts, and the canvas grain shows through everywhere.

The rider crosses the right side of the frame and is the darkest object in the painting. A large winged animal is caught with both wings fully extended, the near one sweeping up out of the top edge and the far one down across the ice, its head turned in profile and a small hunched shape seated at the shoulders. It is painted almost as a silhouette in deep plum and brown, and the measured brightness for the canvas is the highest in this lot, which is why that one dark shape carries so far.

The people who ride those animals were thrown out of this mountain. When the old king died without a clear successor, the three clans that shared the city fought it out, and the winners exiled the other two: one branch went north and rebuilt around a mountain fastness of its own, taking up gryphons and a rougher, more open way of living, and it was generations before they were on speaking terms with the hall they had been expelled from. A winged rider approaching that gate from the outside is not simply arriving. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the same towers weathering a mountain snowstorm and a commander of the same alliance with his gryphon companion.