Frodo and Sam Awaiting the End on Mount Doom — Print & Oil Painting

The two figures are touching, and in a catalogue full of raised swords that is what makes this canvas unusual. One sits upright on the black slope with his knees drawn up, chin lifted, watching the sky. The other lies back against him, head resting on his chest, legs stretched down the rock, one hand open on the ground. Neither of them is doing anything at all.

Both are painted as small and shabby: rolled shirtsleeves, waistcoats, braces, bare feet, hair matted and dirty. There is no armour anywhere in the picture, no weapon, no pack. The artist has stripped them down to two tired bodies on a rock, which is the correct costume for this particular scene.

The sky is split down the middle and the two halves are at war. On the left it is cold slate and charcoal cloud, worked in long horizontal streaks; on the right it is a rising wall of amber and gold. Across the join, four or five burning fragments fly overhead on long curving trails, drawn as thin bright arcs with a glowing head, and they are leaving the frame rather than arriving.

The ground gives them almost nothing. A black ridge of cooled lava comes in from the right and runs down under them, its surface broken into flat plates and fissures, and below it the slope disappears into pale grey ash haze. They are sitting on the last solid thing in the picture.

This is the conversation at the end rather than the deed. The task is done, the ground is coming apart, and the two of them talk about home while they wait: what the fields would look like now, whether anyone will ever tell the story properly. The rescue that arrives afterwards is not in the plan and neither of them expects it. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same pair still walking toward this and the last stretch of the climb.