The Argonath Kings Overlooking Boats on the River — Print & Oil Painting

The carving that has been given the most work is cloth. Both figures wear a long robe falling from the shoulder to the plinth in five or six unbroken vertical folds, and those folds are cut deep, undercut at the edges and weathered along the ridges, so they read as heavy fabric rather than as rock. Faces, hands and crowns are comparatively summary. The drapery is what the sculptor and the painter both cared about.

Colour has almost been eliminated. What the measurement finds is close to grey throughout, and the picture consists of a bone stone, a grey-green water, a pale mist and a sky that runs from a cold blue at the top to the faintest peach at the horizon. Nothing in the frame is saturated. Nothing needs to be.

The two are placed asymmetrically and lean slightly inward, each on a squared plinth cut out of the cliff behind it so that the masonry and the rock share the same face with no join anywhere. Each holds the outer arm straight up from the shoulder, elbow locked, palm forward at the height of its own crown. It is a signal held for several thousand years without a break.

The water fills the bottom third and is almost completely still: a flat plane with a few small crossing ripples and no current visible at all. Between the two figures the gorge opens on a bright bank of haze that gives no information about what lies beyond, and at the foot of the right-hand plinth, three dark slivers with upright marks in them are drifting through.

What lies in that haze is a lake, and past the lake a waterfall large enough that nothing goes over it and comes back. The company in those boats lands on the western shore above the drop, and the party breaks up there rather than at the statues; the gate is the last thing they pass together. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same gorge stood on its end and the same pair with the sun on them.