Aragorn at the Black Gate — Print & Oil Painting

The whole picture is one man's back and what he is looking at. He stands alone in the centre foreground, seen from behind, close enough that his shoulders take up a third of the width of the canvas, and everything else in the image is beyond him and much smaller. We are not watching him. We are standing behind him.

The cloak does the colour work. It is a deep red lined with black, thrown back off the right shoulder and falling in heavy folds to the ground, and it is the only saturated thing anywhere in the frame. Against it, a plain grey-green plain, a slate sky and a bank of dark cloud. A silvered pauldron catches a little light at the shoulder and a long sword is held straight up in the right hand, the blade running clean to the top of his head.

The host in front of him is a single continuous band. It runs the full width of the picture at the horizon, packed shoulder to shoulder, resolved just enough to show helmets and a forest of upright spears with two or three standards and a siege engine among them. Nobody in it is moving yet. It is the flat unhurried density of an army that has already won the arithmetic.

Beyond that, the setting is stated in four marks: a pale low sun in a smoky sky, a dark cone of mountain at the left, a tall thin spike of tower rising at the centre, and a heavy black structure with a gate in it filling the right edge of the frame.

The painter has given him reddish blond hair, where the books make him dark, and the picture is more interesting for the departure: this is a portrait of a posture rather than of a face, and the posture is a man deliberately making himself the most visible thing on an empty plain so that somebody will look at him instead of elsewhere. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same stand made from horseback and the host he is standing in front of.