Link Stands at the Deku Tree's Entrance in Bloom — Print & Oil Painting

Pink against green, and the picture is not interested in much else. The canopy is a single mass of blossom in three or four rose tones, dabbed on with a broad brush and no drawing at all, and it is held in place by ranks of mid-green foliage that come in from both sides like curtains.

Between them the trunk rises as a broad brown mass with a face pressed into it, eyes closed or nearly so, mouth wide and calm, roots spreading over the ground in two great arms. The bark is painted in flat planes rather than texture, which keeps the whole picture in the register of poster art.

A short flight of stone steps leads up to the base and stops at a pedestal. A sword stands upright in that pedestal with its blade caught in a shaft of pale light, and a figure in blue has halted a few paces short of it, back to us, small.

That arrangement is exact: in Breath of the Wild the Master Sword waits in its stone before the Great Deku Tree in a forest that keeps its blossom all year. Part of our Zelda collection. The dusk approach to the same tree drops the colour, and the vine-covered shrine in a field shares the sense of one small structure holding a whole landscape together.