Frodo and Sam leaving the Shire — Print & Oil Painting

This is a landscape that happens to contain two people, and the ratio is the whole idea. The figures occupy perhaps one fiftieth of the canvas. Everything else is grass, forest, mountain and cloud, painted broadly and confidently in the manner of an outdoor study made quickly in good light.

The foreground meadow is the best painting in the picture. It is laid in with upright strokes of lemon, sap green and blue-grey, tall enough to reach the knees of the walkers, with individual seed heads and a few pale wildflowers flicked in at the very front where the brush has been allowed to dance. The sun is behind and to the left, so each blade carries a lit edge.

Behind that, the land recedes in clean bands: a dark green wooded ridge, then a paler wooded shoulder, then three or four ranges of mountains stepping back through slate blue to a soft grey-lilac, each one flatter and cooler than the last. Above them a bank of cumulus is worked in cream and mauve with real weight to it.

The two figures are seen from behind and neither is given a face. The nearer one carries a bulky pack and a walking stick and has a russet head; the further one is taller, thinner, dressed in dark blue-grey, already several paces ahead and set against the darker treeline. They are walking away from us and slightly downhill.

The story marks this walk with a small ceremony at a field boundary, where one of the two stops because another step will take him further from home than he has ever been. A picture this wide, with the pair this small, is the right way to paint that. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside another departure from the same green country and the two of them at the far end of the road.