Two Travelers Resting Beside a Fangorn Stream — Print & Oil Painting

The subject is scale, and the painting withholds it until you find the people. Look first and this is a study of a fallen tree: an old giant lying diagonally across the right half of the frame with its root plate torn up into a wall of writhing timber, mossed over, still holding its shape. Then two small figures resolve against it and the tree turns out to be the size of a house.

One of them sits on the trunk itself, hunched forward in a dark hooded cloak with elbows on knees. The other stands on the bank below in pale grey and white, upright, turned slightly away. Neither is more than an inch high on the canvas and neither has a face. They are placed low and to the right, in the least commanding position available.

The floor between them and us is the best painted passage. Mossy hummocks in olive and ochre, wet stones, exposed root loops, and a shallow stream running out of the left middle distance across the bottom of the frame in short white steps. Every surface has something growing on it.

The light divides the picture in two temperatures. Everything near is warm brown-green under the canopy; far back among the trunks a single cold blue shaft comes down and turns the mist there pale. That cool patch is the only suggestion in the painting that the wood ends somewhere.

This is the wood where identification goes wrong. Three hunters tracking two lost hobbits through these trees meet an old man in white among the trunks and take him for the enemy wizard, which is a reasonable mistake, and the wrong one. A painting that puts a pale figure and a dark figure together under a fallen trunk and refuses to say who either of them is has the right instinct. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same wood after dark and two smaller travellers under the same branches.