A Bear Prowls Below Ironforge's Torchlit Walls — Print & Oil Painting

The architecture in this one is decorated to a degree that nothing else in the group attempts. A tall tiered gatehouse stands in the centre, and its faces are covered in geometric interlace picked out in green teal and gold: chevrons, banded panels, knotted borders and a great looped device over the main arch, repeated at smaller scale on the terraced buildings stepping away to the right. It is a fortification treated as a piece of metalwork.

Fire pours out of the middle of it. A tall orange flame burns in the central archway, bright enough to throw light onto the snow in front and to pick out the ornament above, and behind every window on both wings there is more of the same warm glow. Against the blue evening the building reads as a hot object sitting in a cold one.

The setting is deep winter at dusk. Snow laden conifers close the left edge and the right, blue drifts fill the foreground, the far peaks are lost in a bank of pale gold cloud lit from behind, and half a dozen dark birds cross the sky at the left. Measured hue comes back cyan then blue with the brightness low, which is the snow and the sky; the fire is a small proportion of the canvas doing a very large amount of work.

At the lower right, close to the viewer and clear of the buildings, a brown bear stands in the snow beside a few timber crates and a low shelter. It is not rearing or roaring. It stands four square with its head slightly turned, and the artist has painted it at a size that makes it neither a threat nor a pet, simply an animal that lives here and is not troubled by the lights.

Bears are ordinary company for these people rather than wildlife. Their hunters bond with a beast taken young, keep it for life, feed it, fight beside it and are buried with a good deal less ceremony than it is, and a bear taken from these slopes is the classic choice for somebody from this mountain. A painting that puts one in the foreground of a city gate, unremarked, has understood the arrangement better than a hunting scene would. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with a hunter of the same people with his bear beside him and the halls behind that arch, glowing with forge light.