A Lone Boat Beneath the Somber Argonath Statues — Print & Oil Painting

There is no colour in this picture at all. It is built entirely from greys, from a near black in the foreground rock to a luminous white in the cloud between the two figures, and the tonal range is used with the discipline of an engraving: every form is separated from its neighbour by value alone. The result is cold, silvered and completely still.

The two kings stand high on separate pillars of rock, one at the upper left and one at the upper right, and both are cropped by the top of the frame. Each holds the near hand up with the palm out; each carries a long hafted weapon down the front of the body; each wears a tall crowned helm. Below their feet the pillars fall away in sheer vertical faces streaked with pale weathering.

Between them the gorge is full of cloud. A great bank of it has risen from the water and hangs at the level of their knees, brilliantly lit from behind, and it is the brightest thing in the composition. Both figures are standing above the weather and looking out over it, which puts them at a height the picture never has to state.

The boat is almost hidden. At the very bottom left corner, in dark water at the foot of the near cliff, a small open craft carries two or three figures, drawn in a few strokes and no larger than a fingernail. Rock, wet and black, closes the whole lower right of the frame and pushes the boat into the corner.

The book insists that the figures are worn. It gives them blurred eyes and cracked brows, and a helm and crown that are described as crumbling, and it makes clear that these are very old carvings frowning northward at a frontier the kingdom that cut them can no longer reach. A version in nothing but grey, with the faces given up entirely to distance and cloud, is the one that respects that. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same pair lit by a burning sunset and the same figures painted from behind.