Flight of the Heinkel He 111 Over Majestic Alps — Print & Oil Painting

Start at the bottom of the canvas, because that is where the painting is strongest: a long alpine lake in pale green and blue, holding the reflection of the mountains, with wooded slopes falling to the water on both sides and a scatter of autumn colour on the near ridge. It is a landscape painting first, and the aircraft happen to be crossing it.

Two twin engined bombers fly right to left, one close and one further back and lower. The near machine shows a smoothly rounded, fully glazed nose, engines in round cowlings on the wing leading edge, a single fin at the tail, and black crosses on the upper wing and fuselage side. That combination, glazed nose and one fin on a twin, is the He 111 in its later production form, the version that carried the type's recognisable stepless front end and served as the Luftwaffe's principal medium bomber in the first years of the war.

The handling is old fashioned in the best sense: careful cumulus built up in small strokes, snow on the peaks left slightly warm rather than pure white, and the aircraft rendered with the same brush as the rock so that nothing sits on top of the scene like a decal.

There is no target here, no smoke, no tracer, nothing to say what the flight is for. The picture is about two machines and a valley, and the discomfort of finding the valley beautiful is left entirely to the viewer.

From our World War 2 collection, beside Bomber Run Over a Burning Rail Yard, which shows what the other end of a flight like this looked like.