Galadriel in Rivendell at night — Print & Oil Painting

The measured saturation here is the highest of any picture in this group, and every point of it has gone into one colour. Sky, cliff, water, stone, cloth and skin are all versions of a deep cobalt blue, pushed far past anything a night sky actually does, and the only relief in the entire frame is a small warm halo around a crescent moon at the upper left. It is less a night scene than a scene submerged.

A stone portico frames the view and it is not empty. Two carved women stand against the flanking piers, one at each edge, in long robes with dark foliage growing over their shoulders and arms, both eroded and both unlit. They are at roughly the same scale as the living figure between them, which sets up a comparison the picture never comments on.

She stands dead centre on a pale flagged terrace, and the largest single shape in the composition is her dress. It falls from the shoulder in a straight column of blue-grey and then spreads across the floor behind her in a long train that occupies the whole bottom of the frame, painted in broad soft folds with no pattern and no ornament anywhere on it.

The lighting is the strange part. The moon is small, high and to the left, and it is not what is illuminating her. The light on her face, throat and hair comes from the front and slightly below, has no source anywhere in the frame, and falls on nothing else: the statues beside her, the terrace under her and the gorge behind her all stay in shadow. She is lit and the world is not.

She does not come to this valley in the books, where her country is a forest a long way south and east and she stays in it. Her presence in these particular halls belongs to the Hobbit films, which convene the council of the wise at this house and put her at the table with three others. A painting that gives her the architecture and none of the meeting has taken the setting and left the scene. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same courtyard with the council in it and the same lady painted in her own country.