The Fellowship Beneath Twin Trees at Durin's Doors — Print & Oil Painting

Two trees take this painting and the door is left with almost nothing. They stand one on each side of centre, their crowns filling the upper half of a square canvas in dense dark masses of needle-fine strokes, their trunks short and thick, their roots spread wide over a pale rocky shore. The famous doorway between them is about the size of a postage stamp.

Colour has been reduced to almost nothing. The cliff, the trees, the stones and the water are all worked in the same range of grey, slate and a cold bottle green, and the cliff face behind is streaked with long vertical drags of thin paint that read as rain, seepage or simply the weight of the rock. The single hue permitted anywhere is the pale blue-white of the arch itself.

The figures are tiny and unposed. One stands directly at the door with an arm raised, half a dozen more are scattered across the shore in ones and twos, sitting, standing, apparently waiting, and a pony stands patiently at the left with a load on its back. Nobody is doing anything dramatic, which is the correct reading of a scene that consists largely of a delay.

The bottom third of the canvas is water and it is completely empty. Flat, near black, unbroken except for two small rocks breaking the surface at the left, it takes up as much room as the trees do and contains nothing at all. That emptiness is the most frightening thing in the picture.

The trees are not decoration: a pair of them marks the old boundary of the elven country here, and the design on the rock is drawn in a metal that answers only to moonlight, which is why it is showing now and was invisible an hour ago. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same shore with the water no longer empty and the doorway studied on its own.