The Fellowship of the Ring crossing a bridge in Rivendell — Print & Oil Painting

The bridge is the only piece of geometry in the picture and everything else has been kept deliberately soft. It springs from a rocky bank at the left, rises to one clean semicircular arch over a fall of white water, and lands again at the right, and its parapet is the single straight edge anywhere on the canvas.

The party crosses in single file from left to right and is painted small, perhaps a twelfth of the height of the frame. A cloaked figure with a staff brings up the rear at the far left, a laden pony walks with a small hooded companion at its head, three more short figures follow in a close bunch, then two taller ones with a bow and a long blade, and at the front a tall figure in a pointed hat with a staff has already reached the far side. Not one face is drawn.

Colour has been rationed to two accents. The whole picture is grey-green: wet rock, dark conifers, mist and falling water, all held within a few steps of each other. Against that, a stand of gold autumn foliage burns at the right edge and a smaller one answers it at the top left, and the two of them frame the arch like curtains.

The paint is dry and thin and the tooth of the support shows through nearly everywhere, particularly in the water, which is scumbled rather than drawn and has no individual highlights in it at all. It gives the picture the feel of a working study rather than a finished plate.

The company leaves this valley in the dead of winter with no plan beyond the first stage of the road, and a small pony carries what they can take. Painting the departure as a modest procession over a garden bridge rather than as an heroic muster is much closer to how the book stages it. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the house they are walking away from and another view of the same company in this valley.