A Parent and Child Walk Toward Darnassus's Moonlit Gate — Print & Oil Painting

Two figures walk away from us up a dirt path at the left, and the whole picture has been arranged around the difference in their heights. The adult is broad shouldered and dark, one arm hanging, the child perhaps half that height and close beside, and both are painted as flat silhouettes with no features whatever. They are small in the frame and they are the only things in it that are moving.

Ahead of them, framed in a gap between the trees, stands a gate structure glowing violet pink: a broad curved lintel with three finials rising from it, backlit so strongly that its shape reads as a stencil against the light. Two cold blue lamps burn on posts at the left of the path, much nearer and much smaller, and the pairing of the near blue lights with the far pink one is what pulls the eye up the road.

The right half of the canvas belongs to a single enormous tree. Its trunk leans in from the edge, its roots sprawl down into a still pool at the bottom right, and its canopy of glowing magenta foliage fills the top corner. The pool is painted almost as brightly as the sky, holding pink and lilac reflections and a few dark stones, and a second pavilion with a curved roof stands on the far bank.

The measured saturation is high and the brightness low, which is the whole atmosphere in two numbers: strong violet and magenta everywhere, very little actual light, and no true black except in the two walking figures. The paint is loose throughout, with the undergrowth in the foreground indicated by quick upward flicks and the far foliage by broad soft masses.

What eventually happened to a city like this one fell hardest on exactly these two. The tree was set alight during a war with the soldiers of the realm mostly elsewhere, so the population left inside was overwhelmingly civilian, and the evacuation could only go downward and out to sea; the survivors were resettled as refugees in an allied human capital and did not get the place back. A painting of an adult and a child walking home at night, in a city that would later be counted rather than defended, is heavier than it first looks. It belongs to our World of Warcraft collection, near a mother of the same people sheltering her child from raiders and the host that was mustered to burn that tree, massed beneath its own walls.