Sylvanas Windrunner Standing Before a Stone Wall — Print & Oil Painting

She has been posed against a wall like a sitter in a studio. A flat mottled grey fills the entire background, brushed unevenly the way a painted backdrop is, with a soft pool of lighter tone behind the shoulders and no other feature anywhere. The figure stands full length on nothing in particular.

The format is unusually tall and she has been given the whole of it, from the crown of the hood to the toes of the boots. That is rare in this group: almost every other portrait of her stops at the waist. Here the cloak matters, and it falls in one long unbroken black mass from the left shoulder to the floor, edged with a ragged fringe.

The right hand is raised behind the shoulder, reaching back toward the quiver of arrows standing there, and the whole body turns slightly with it. It is the mildest possible action, caught before anything happens. The armour is black leather and dark plate with pale scrollwork, small teal stones at the knee, the hip and the pauldron, and a spray of white feathers under each shoulder.

Colour has been almost entirely withheld. The saturation reading here is among the lowest of the eighteen paintings of her, and the warm notes are limited to the dull red of the hood and the amber of the eyes. Everything else is grey, black and bone.

She trained exactly one human. He was the only outsider ever admitted to the ranger corps she commanded, a difficult man who was disliked by most of the elves he served with, and when he was killed she had him raised so that he could keep working for her. That is her one recorded act of professional loyalty and it involved digging somebody up. A full-length portrait with her hand on the quiver and nobody else in the frame is a picture of a commander with a very small staff. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the same armour lit against pure black and the same figure standing over her killer's fallen helm.