Hogwarts Castle Rising Above the Mountains — Print & Oil Painting

Three cloaked figures stand on a spit of dark rock in the lower right corner, and they are about a fingernail tall. Every other element in the landscape is calibrated against them: the cliff, the waterfalls, the loch, the range behind, the enormous banked cloud. They exist to tell you how big the rest of it is.

The castle takes the left third and sits on top of its own precipice. It does not so much rise above the mountains as stand in front of them, on its own rock, which is the more convincing arrangement. A drum tower with a red-brown conical roof and a corbelled parapet dominates; beside it a gabled hall carries one great round window; beyond that a row of thin black spires steps down towards the water. Waterfalls drop from the crag in three or four white threads and turn to mist before they land.

Between castle and figures the loch runs back into the distance, glassy and pale, rock walls closing in on both sides, a snow-streaked range dissolving into haze at the far end. Birds turn in a loose grey cloud below the towers.

The sky is where this painting spends its warmth. Cumulus piles across the right half in white and cream with blue torn through it, and the light off that cloud is the only reason the stone reads green-grey rather than black. The handling is that of a matte painting, broad and atmospheric, with almost no small detail below the roofline. Part of our Harry Potter collection, alongside the same castle at sunset and the railway through country of the same kind.