Link Charges With His Four Transformation Masks — Print & Oil Painting

The composition is one long diagonal running from the bottom-right corner up to the top-left, and five bodies are threaded onto it like beads. He is at the near end, closest and largest, mouth open mid-shout, blond hair pushed back by his own speed, the shield swung forward on his left arm and a broad blade cutting across the bottom corner.

The shield deserves a moment. Green face, pale grey border studded with rivets, and a red and gold crest with the Triforce set into it, all drawn flat and graphic in the manner of the older games rather than as the polished metal of the later ones.

Behind him, in order up the diagonal, come the other four. A heavy brown-green body with fists like paving stones and purple beads slung over the shoulder. A small wooden face with a snout and a leaf-blond fringe, holding a red-petalled flower overhead as a propeller. A smooth blue-green head with dark almond eyes and long fins swept back. And at the top, in silver plate and white hair, the last of them, looking away from the fight rather than into it.

The ground has been dropped entirely. There is no landscape, only churned ochre cloud, so the group reads as a poster rather than as a scene, and the whole picture is worked in warm sepia apart from the green tunics and the small winged sphere of yellow light at his shoulder. From our Zelda collection, alongside the green poster of many Link incarnations for the other way of stacking one hero into one frame.