Aragorn Strider Portrait with His Blade — Print & Oil Painting

Look closely and the skin is not painted, it is stippled. The whole face is built from thousands of small separate marks, dots and short hatched strokes of ochre, rose, olive and violet sitting side by side without being blended, so that from a metre away it reads as weathered flesh and from ten centimetres away it dissolves into confetti. It is a slow, patient way to make a portrait and it suits a slow, patient character.

One warm light comes in hard from the left. It lays a broad gold plane down the forehead, the bridge of the nose and the near cheek, and leaves the far side of the face in a deep bruised violet that pools under the eye socket and along the jaw. The two temperatures meet without a transition, which gives the head its weight.

The eyes are the exception to all of it. Both are a clear cool green, rendered smoothly where everything around them is granular, and they are looking slightly off to our left rather than at us. Long dark blond hair falls in heavy separated strands past both shoulders, and a short beard is drawn stroke by stroke rather than as a mass.

Two objects intrude at the bottom. A silver pendant hangs at the base of the throat on a fine chain, and in the lower right corner a sword rises into frame, its crossguard and grip cut off by the edge, held close enough to the body to read as a habit rather than a threat. The background is a plain warm haze that carries no information at all.

This is the man before the title, the one who takes rooms at country inns under a borrowed name and lets people assume the worst of him. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same ranger painted at the inn in Bree and the crown he has not yet agreed to take.