Aragorn on horse portrait at Black Gate — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is almost perfectly symmetrical and it is the horse that makes it so. Animal and rider come straight at the viewer down the centre line, shoulders square, head level, with the mass of the horse's chest filling the lower half of a tall frame and the man sitting exactly above it. Fold the image down the middle and the two halves very nearly agree.

The harness has been given more work than the armour. A moulded chamfron covers the horse's face with a raised crest running between the ears, an embossed roundel hangs at the breast, a second plate is strapped at the shoulder, and the whole assembly is picked out in worn gold. By comparison the rider wears dark scale, a plain gorget and a red cloak thrown back off one shoulder, and almost none of it is decorated.

The colour is a single warm brown from edge to edge. Sky, dust, ground, faces and metal have all been brought to within a few steps of the same sepia, with the cloak carrying the only red and the sky carrying the only light: a heavy bank of cloud lit from behind at the upper left, thinning to a pale gold at the horizon.

He holds a long sword down and out to the right, blade angled toward the ground, and a spear or standard pole rises through the frame at the left. Behind him and much lower, an army is stated as a band of small helmeted shapes and a thicket of upright shafts, blurred and greyed, running off both edges.

The gate the title names was not built by the people who now hold it. The wall across that pass and the towers on either side of it were raised by the kingdom this rider claims, put up as a watch on a country that had been emptied, and then abandoned, occupied and turned around to face the other way. Riding up to it in Gondor's colours is a claim on the masonry as well as a challenge. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same stand seen from behind his shoulder and the host waiting on the far side of it.