Gandalf the Grey portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The staff has been painted with more care than the man. It runs the full height of the left third of the canvas, a length of pale timber that twists as it climbs, knotted at three or four points, cut off square at the top and gripped near the middle by a hand that has been given real attention: knuckles, tendons, the loose skin over the back of it. The wood grain is legible. The face, by comparison, is generalised.

The crop is wide and very little of it is occupied. He sits in the right half at chest height, the staff holds the left edge, and the whole centre of the picture is empty grey-green atmosphere with nothing in it at all. In a format this broad that emptiness is a real decision, and it gives the head somewhere to be quiet.

The hat is the largest shape on the figure. It is a pale grey-cream cone with a wide soft brim that dips over the brow, the crown bent forward and creased along its length, and it throws almost no shadow, so the whole head sits in a flat even light with no drama anywhere on it.

Nothing is happening and the expression declines to help. The mouth is closed under the moustache, the brows are level, and the eyes are directed slightly left of the viewer at a middle distance. He is not casting anything, warning anyone or setting out. He is standing still in weather with a stick in his hand.

That stick is more consequential than it looks. He lights the road through the mines with it, and then brings it down on the bridge at the far end to break the span under what is chasing them; neither the bridge nor the staff comes out of that, and the one he carries afterwards is a different colour and a different office. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same staff carried with a pipe and the same head printed as an old plate.