Horseman Riding Past the Giza Pyramids — Print & Oil Painting

There is no colour in this picture at all. Not muted, not faded: the measured hue content is essentially zero, so the whole image is made of value alone, running from the near white of the plain along the bottom, through a wide band of haze, up to soft charcoal at the top of the sky. Into all that grey a single rider has been placed at roughly the size of a thumbnail.

Three pyramids stand in the haze behind him, decreasing left to right, their edges softened almost to nothing by distance and dust. The middle one carries the most mass and the sharpest silhouette; the right one is markedly smaller. At Giza that inequality is real rather than atmospheric. Two of the three are near giants and the third stands at well under half their height, and the plateau tilts enough that the middle pyramid can look like the tallest from the plain even though it is not.

The rider is the only incident. Horse and man are a single dark mark, legs extended in a gallop, moving left to right across the bottom of the frame with nothing ahead of them and nothing behind. There is no track, no caravan, no shadow to speak of, and no second figure anywhere.

The whole picture depends on the ratio between that mark and the space around it, which means it needs room on a wall. Crowded between other frames it collapses; given clear space on either side it does what it is designed to do, which is make a viewer feel the distance between one man and four and a half thousand years of masonry.

From our Ancient Egypt collection. For the same monuments treated as the subject rather than as the horizon, see Pyramids in Morning Mist.