Orthanc Tower Rising Above the Green Vale of Isengard — Print & Oil Painting

Nothing in this landscape is blended. Every rock face, tree, field and cloud is laid down as a flat slab of colour with a hard edge, the way a poster is cut rather than the way a picture is painted, and the modelling of the cliff at the left is done entirely by placing three or four values of red-brown next to each other. Seen from a distance it resolves into deep space; up close it is a mosaic of angular patches.

The valley is the subject and it is green, farmed and calm. A broad grass floor runs from the bottom of the frame back toward the centre, dotted with rounded olive trees and crossed by a pale road that winds in from the left, and low hedged ground rises on the right. The colour is spring green and midday, with a bright cloudy sky filling the whole upper right.

Set into the middle of that is a wide low ring. The wall runs across the picture as a long shallow ellipse of dark stone, only a few storeys high and thin as a rim, and inside it, at the exact centre of the composition, the black tower stands up alone in four fused shafts that split at the top into horns. Nothing else is built anywhere in the valley.

The scale reads correctly because of the trees. The olive shapes along the road are recognisable as individual trees, the wall is perhaps ten of them high, and the tower is many times that, so the eye works out the distance without being told. Both the wall and the tower are painted in the same cold near black, and they are the only cold notes in a warm picture.

The geography is right out of the text. A great circle of stone, a mile across, with one gate in it and a single tower standing in the middle of the enclosed plain, set in a valley of its own at the foot of the mountains that has its own name in the old tongue. This is the ring drawn as it is described, before anything happened to it. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same ring seen from closer in and the same valley painted in blossom.