Boats Crossing the Lake to Hogwarts at Night — Print & Oil Painting

A row of small boats, five or six of them, each with a lantern burning at the prow and a huddle of figures aboard. The repetition sets the rhythm of the whole picture: a line of white points strung across the water, and under each one a long broken reflection dropped straight down into the black.

Above them the castle is a cut-out. It stands on its crag in near silhouette, spires and pitched roofs and one great conical tower rising out of a mass of rock, with a scatter of yellow windows low on the right as the only warm colour anywhere. Cloud stacks behind it in dark grey layers, and mist lies along the base of the cliff in a flat white band that separates the building from its own reflection.

Colour has been pulled almost entirely out. Blue-black water, pewter cloud, slate stone, white lantern light. Nothing is left to compete with the flames, which is how five or six small ones manage to carry an entire image.

Everything is stated at the smallest possible scale. The boats are a few strokes each, the passengers are shapes of shoulder and hood, the castle windows are single dabs. From across a room it reads as one silvered form on black; close up it stays deliberately unresolved, which is the honest way to paint a night crossing seen from the shore. It sits in our Harry Potter collection, and the same journey rebuilt in thick blue and yellow paint in the Van Gogh version. For the castle in daylight see the view across the water.