Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins Sharing Breakfast at Bag End — Print & Oil Painting

This is a domestic interior with two people in it and nothing else happening, and it is one of the warmest paintings in the collection. Every surface is amber, honey or brown, the light comes from a lamp and a window somewhere off to the right, and the whole canvas is built out of soft reflections off wood, pewter and pottery.

The wizard occupies the left, seen in profile, hunched forward with both hands over the table. Long white hair and a longer beard, a heavy dark robe, a heavy shoulder. He is much too large for the room and the artist has made a point of it: his head sits close under the low ceiling and his back fills a quarter of the frame.

The hobbit stands opposite in a red waistcoat, white shirtsleeves rolled, curly hair, pouring from a black kettle with both hands and his eyes on what he is doing. He is neat, upright and busy. One of these two is being served and the other is serving, and the postures say so without any expression being needed.

The table between them is a still life in its own right: a slab of butter on a board, a plate of cut bread, mugs, a stoneware jug, a candle in a low holder, a small dish of something yellow. Behind them a round-arched doorway opens onto a lit kitchen with more crockery, and pans hang from a rail at the right.

Both of the long stories that come out of this house begin exactly here, over food, with an old man turning up uninvited and a comfortable person being talked into something. The joke that the book makes and the painting keeps is that the hospitality is never in doubt: whatever else is going to happen, breakfast will be properly served first. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same two outside the same door and the cart that brought him up the lane.