A Fellowship Boat Drifting Past the Distant Argonath — Print & Oil Painting

The statues have been demoted to scenery, and the painting is far better for it. They stand small and pale in the middle distance, one on a spur at the left and one at the centre, both of them half dissolved into the haze, and neither is given more emphasis than the cliffs they are carved from. A viewer who did not know the subject would take a minute to find them.

What the picture is really about is air. The whole canvas is a warm rose, apricot and pale lilac, with a broad shaft of light coming down from the upper left through the mist and striking the water, and every plane of rock beyond the middle distance has been dropped a step toward the colour of the sky. It is a straightforward and very effective piece of aerial perspective.

Against all that softness the river is a shock. It runs the width of the bottom third in a saturated turquoise, shallow enough to show pale rocks under the surface, with a white cascade falling into it at the far left and the current breaking around boulders in the foreground. It is the only cold colour in the painting.

The boats are tiny and there are several of them, dark commas strung out along the channel with upright marks in them, and a line of even smaller figures stands on the left bank near the falls. Autumn trees in rust and gold crowd the right foreground, painted in loose broken touches, and the paint everywhere else is thin, blended and quiet.

By the time the company reaches this water they have been travelling on it for over a week, having been given the boats as a parting gift, and the craft themselves are described as strangely light and hard to sink. A picture in which the river is vivid and the monuments are a rumour in the mist is closer to what that journey felt like than a portrait of the statues would be. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same gate taken from directly beneath and the wood where those boats were given.