Deku Link Plays While Skull Kid Dances on a Stump — Print & Oil Painting

Two instruments, one clearing, and the whole picture is arranged as a duet. On the left a boy sits on a mossy boulder with his eyes shut and a small blue ocarina held in both hands at his mouth; on the right, up on a sawn stump, a masked figure balances on one foot with a pipe to its lips and the other leg kicked out behind. Neither is watching the other. They are listening.

It should be said that the player on the rock is in Hylian form here, blond hair under a green cap, pointed ear, bare knees, rather than the wooden Deku shape the title of the piece names. The instrument is unmistakably the blue ocarina. The scene works either way, but the discrepancy is real and worth knowing before it is framed.

The dancer is the better invention: a black face with two yellow lamps for eyes inside a great fringe of orange straw, a green shirt, an orange skirt hung with brass rings, and long curling boots. Its posture is all diagonal and its silhouette is unmistakable at any size.

The forest behind is a screen of slim vertical trunks lit teal and blue, with a sunset burning orange through them at the upper right, and two fairies float in the clearing, one pale gold beside the boy and one pink above the stump. Anyone who has played Majora's Mask knows that the Skull Kid travels with exactly two. Part of our Zelda collection, near the dance before the moon and the barefoot ocarina at dusk.