Boats Passing Beneath the Argonath in Golden Light — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is nearly three times as wide as it is tall, and the whole design exploits that. There is no centre of interest at all: the eye enters at the two dark statues on the left, is walked across a bank of gold cloud in the middle, and comes to rest on a wall of pale eroded rock at the right. It is built to be read across rather than looked into.

The statues are given almost no detail and lose nothing by it. Both are cloaked figures on rough stone plinths cut straight out of the cliff, their robes falling in a few long vertical folds, their heads crowned and simplified to a silhouette. The nearer one reaches an arm out over the water with the palm turned outward, and the gesture is unmistakable even at this size: stop.

Light comes from behind everything. The cloud bank at centre is worked in cream, apricot and a smoky violet, and it back-lights both the statues and the far cliffs, so the left third of the picture is almost entirely in shadow while the right third is bleached and hazy. A low mist sits on the water and softens the base of every vertical.

Scale is settled in the last few centimetres of the canvas. Along the bottom right, on flat pale water, three or four dark slivers with tiny upright marks in them are drifting through, each about the length of a fingernail paring, and a scatter of birds crosses the gap between the cliffs.

The carving is exact to the text. The two are kings of the same line, hewn facing north, an axe in the right hand and the left raised palm outwards as a warning to anything coming downriver. Painting the boats as four specks passing under that hand is the correct proportion. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the pair studied at sunset from the water and the same passage made under an open blue sky.