A Cloaked Figure Approaching Rivendell at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

One mark in this picture is red and everything else is gold, olive or grey. At the bottom centre, standing ankle deep in the shallow water of a stream bed with his back to the viewer, is a single small figure in a crimson cloak that reaches the water. He is perhaps a fiftieth of the height of the frame. Nothing else in the painting carries that colour at all.

What he is looking at is a building that spans the water. The great hall on the right is carried on a broad low arch thrown across the stream, with a balustraded terrace running along its front, tall carved piers, and a run of small windows above; further back and higher, more roofs and a gallery climb the cliff among trees. The whole complex has been painted as though it grew on the rock rather than being set on it.

The light comes low from the right and is doing something specific: it rakes across the front of the hall, lights the tops of the trees on the right bank, and leaves the entire left third of the canvas in cold blue shadow. Down that shadowed side a great column of white mist pours off the cliff and spreads out across the water in front of the figure.

Autumn is well advanced. Rust and orange foliage crowds the terrace and the near bank, the grass on the right is still green under the sun, and at the top of the frame a snow-covered peak stands above the gorge in pale blue. The paint is soft, atmospheric and almost without hard edges anywhere except in the architecture.

Everyone in these books arrives at this house at the end of something rather than the beginning: wet, hunted, injured, out of supplies, or all four. The place is described as good for whichever of eating, sleeping, working or simply sitting still the visitor happens to need most. A picture of one exhausted traveller stopped in the water with the lit hall in front of him has that exactly. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to other travellers on the path beneath these falls and an arrival at the same valley painted by moonlight.