Torchlit Halls Glow Deep Within Ironforge — Print & Oil Painting

There is no daylight anywhere in this picture and no sky, and the difference that makes is immediate. The whole canvas is orange, amber and deep red brown, lit from perhaps fifty separate small fires, and the measured contrast is the lowest of any work in this lot: everything sits within a narrow warm band, nothing is black and nothing is white, and the eye has to work its way in rather than being directed.

The scale is established by architecture rather than by figures. Colossal square piers and round columns rise past the top of the frame, arcaded facades of four and five storeys run away on both sides with lit windows in ordered rows, carved reliefs and hanging banners occupy the walls between them, and a great arch spans the upper left with a long dark shape suspended beneath it. None of the structures is shown complete; the frame cuts every one of them.

Along the floor of the hall run two lines of small braziers, receding in strict perspective toward the centre and doubled by their own reflections in the polished paving, which is wet or simply burnished enough to act as a mirror. Between them, dozens of very small figures move about in ones and twos, none of them more than a few brushstrokes and none of them given any attention at all.

In the lower left corner, close and turned away, stands a heavy cloaked figure with a broad back and a pale bushy beard just visible in profile. He is the largest thing in the picture and he is doing nothing but looking, which puts the viewer at his shoulder rather than in the hall. Measured saturation is very high while the brightness stays low, and that combination is exactly what a room lit only by fire does.

The fire in a hall like this is not lit and put out. At the centre of this city is a forge that has been burning continuously for longer than any of the human kingdoms in this collection have existed, fed and tended in shifts, and the city was laid out around it rather than the other way about: the heat, the light and the industry of the entire place come off one fire that nobody has ever been allowed to let go out. A painting with no sun in it and fifty fires is a portrait of that arrangement. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the towers above these halls weathering a snowstorm and a warrior armed out of that forge, gripping a massive hammer.