Riders Emerging Through a Forest of Spears at Dawn — Print & Oil Painting

The viewer has been put in the wrong army. The camera sits low among the ranks of the besiegers, close enough that a dozen pike shafts rise across the frame from the bottom edge and lean at every angle, some of them crossing, all of them out of focus. We are looking out through the enemy's own weapons at whatever is coming.

What is coming is mostly light. The centre of the picture is a white-gold flare at the top of a slope, spilling down over the heads of the crowd and washing out the ridge behind, and inside it a thin dark line of riders is just beginning to separate into individual horses. They are perhaps a fortieth of the height of the frame and they are the sharpest thing in it.

The host itself has been reduced to a crust of helmets along the bottom and a texture of shafts above. Not one figure is complete, no face is drawn anywhere, and the ranks recede into dust within about four rows. The frame is more than twice as wide as it is tall, which flattens everything and makes the mass feel like a surface rather than a crowd.

Colour has been almost entirely abandoned. The whole image sits in a narrow band of bone, dust and pale grey-brown, with the only real black in the near pike shafts, and the light is doing all the modelling. It has the look of a photograph shot into the sun with the exposure set for the shadows.

The story does not end at the ridge. The army in this picture is driven downhill into the valley, and waiting for it there is a wood that had not existed the previous evening, standing across the whole width of the ground and rustling without any wind. The host runs into the trees to get away from the horses, and no account of what happened inside is ever given, because nothing came out. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the rider they are looking at and one of them painted at close range in the rain.