A Lone Figure Beholds Ironforge's Snowbound Peaks — Print & Oil Painting

Very few paintings in this collection give so much of themselves to empty ground. Range after range of snow covered peaks fills the frame from edge to edge and from the horizon down almost to the bottom, painted in confident flat planes of white, blue grey and slate, with hard shadowed facets and no soft edges anywhere. The sky above is a clean daylight blue with high cumulus, and the whole surface is bright, cold and thoroughly unwelcoming.

The architecture has to be looked for. Set into the central massif, roughly a third of the way up, are pale stone structures: a bright arched gate at the middle with a gold lit opening, and a series of square terraces and buttresses stepping along the rock to either side. They are painted in almost the same value as the snow around them and they occupy a tiny fraction of the canvas, so the city registers as an incident on a mountain rather than as a place.

At the lower left, on a bare snow slope in front of a dark rock outcrop, a small hooded figure in green walks away from the viewer with a long implement over one shoulder. He is perhaps a fiftieth of the height of the frame. The outcrop above him is the only genuinely dark mass in the picture and it exists mainly to stop the eye leaving at that corner.

The handling is broad and economical throughout, closer to a design sketch than to a finished painting: whole ridgelines are single strokes, the shadows are laid in as flat shapes, and nothing is blended. Measured brightness is among the highest in the lot and the saturation is low, which is the honest reading of a scene made from snow, rock and sky and almost nothing else.

Figures walking out into country like this on their own are an institution here. This people runs a chartered society of prospectors, diggers and archaeologists out of a hall inside that mountain, and it exists to answer one question: their own origin. What its expeditions kept turning up is that these people were not born as such at all but manufactured, shaped out of living stone by the powers that built the world, and that their entire recorded history begins after a very long sleep. A small figure setting off alone across a mountain range is that society's whole method. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside another lone figure studying the same mountain through falling snow and a weathered map of the continents those expeditions were sent across.