A Dwarf Leads a Pack Ram Along Ironforge's Cliffs — Print & Oil Painting

The measured saturation here is the lowest of all fifty canvases in this lot, barely a tenth of the scale, and the painting earns it honestly. Grey stone, grey sky, white snow, blue grey shadow: there is no local colour anywhere except one green cloak. Everything else has been drained until the picture is effectively a tonal drawing with weather in it.

The format is tall and the drop is the point. A snow covered ledge runs across the lower middle of the frame, and below it the rock falls away into a ravine that the artist has left deliberately vague, so the eye keeps sliding off the edge. A flight of steps cut into the cliff climbs from that ledge up to the left, and stone structures cling to the rock above them: a tower with an arched window, a spanning arch, a retaining wall, all half buried in snow.

Two figures occupy the ledge. A short broad person in a pale green hooded cloak stands facing away, and beside him a heavy horned animal waits with its head lowered: thick curled horns, a shaggy pale fleece, and a load of brown packs and rolled bundles strapped across its back and flanks. The animal is drawn with more care than the man, particularly the horns and the fall of the fleece over the shoulders.

Snow is falling hard and it has been painted as a moving thing rather than as decoration. Flakes streak diagonally across the whole surface, denser at the top, blurring the middle distance and reducing the far ravine to a suggestion, and the same streaks lie across the figures without regard for what is behind them. It puts a layer of weather between the viewer and everything else in the picture.

The animal is the transport system of this entire kingdom. Its people breed heavy mountain rams to ride and to load, because the country they hold is a high frozen valley with steps instead of roads and gradients no horse will take, and a beast that goes up rock by preference solves a problem that a cart cannot. A picture that gives the ram better drawing than the drover has the priorities of the place about right. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the gate at the end of that climb, glowing under a rose coloured dusk and one of the same people off duty, standing in a tavern.