Orthanc Tower Rising From the Ring of Isengard — Print & Oil Painting

The subject is a circle, seen at an angle from a height. A wall of dark stone runs right round an enormous flat plain, unbroken except at one point, and the painter has taken a viewpoint high on a wooded slope so that the ring reads as a near-perfect ellipse laid out on the valley floor. Everything else in the composition exists to make that shape legible.

At the exact centre of the ellipse stands a single black tower: a narrow shaft splitting at the summit into four horns, no windows worth the name, no outbuildings, no wall of its own. It is the only vertical in a landscape made entirely of horizontals, and the distance between it and the ring wall is what the picture is really measuring.

The ground inside the ring has been ruined. It is scraped grey and pitted, with rubble and standing water in the hollows, and three or four thin columns of smoke rise from holes in it and lean sideways in the wind. Immediately outside the wall the land is green: grass, woods, a river winding away to the left in bright loops, snow on the mountains behind.

Foliage frames both edges of the canvas in deep unlit green, which pushes the ring back into the middle distance and lets the sky open in the centre. That sky carries the mood: heavy grey cloud along the top, and a low band of clear yellow light lying on the mountains that reaches nothing at all inside the circle.

The contrast between the two kinds of ground is a fact rather than an invention. The plain inside that wall was once green, planted with avenues and orchards and watered by the river, before it was dug up, paved and hollowed out for pits and furnaces by the wizard who held the tower. This painting shows the exact border between the two versions of one field. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same ring painted while it was still green and what was burning down in those pits.