The Fellowship of the Ring at Rivendell — Print & Oil Painting

Moss has been given more attention than architecture here, and it changes the whole reading of the valley. Every rock face in the picture is furred with it, thick and wet and running in green sheets down into the gorge, and where the cliff has been carved into a gallery of pointed openings on the right, the moss has climbed over the piers and closed most of the way across the arches. The building is losing.

The gorge is a slot. Two near-vertical walls rise from the water and out of the top of the frame, close enough together that the sky is barely present, and between them a single stone arch springs from one side to the other in one clean semicircle. Everything above the arch is vegetation and everything below it is water.

And the water is violent. Directly under the span the river comes down over pale boulders in a wide white torrent, worked with hard broken strokes and a good deal of spray, and it is the noisiest passage on the canvas by a distance. The company crossing above it is painted in a fraction of the detail: ten or eleven dark figures in single file, a pony among them, none more than a centimetre tall, none given a face.

Colour is split by height. The upper third carries a canopy of gold and amber autumn leaves on branches that lean in from both edges; the middle band is deep forest green and wet grey stone; the bottom is white water and blue-green shadow. The eye enters at the gold, walks along the bridge, and drops.

The house at the end of that bridge has stood since the middle of the Second Age, which is old enough for a wood to grow up over it, and the picture has taken that literally rather than painting the place as a new-built palace. It is a household with a very long lease, and the forest has had the same amount of time to make its case. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same crossing painted thin and dry and where all that water comes from.