Gandalf and Gwaihir — Print & Oil Painting

The bird has been painted as a bird. Not as a monster with feathers on it: the mass sits correctly over the feet, the wing coverts overlap in the right order and thin out properly toward the primaries, the folded tail is a little worn at the tip, and the head carries the flat brow and deep-set eye of an actual eagle. It is an ornithological study that happens to be the size of a building.

It stands in profile on a flat table of rock and takes the upper two thirds of the canvas, wings closed, the hooked beak pale yellow, the feet the same yellow with the toes hooked over the edge of the stone. Nothing about the pose is aggressive. The animal is simply standing.

The man is small and down in the corner at the right. He sits on the same rock in grey robes and a pointed hat with one hand raised near his face, and a wisp of smoke lifts away from him. He is waiting, and he is smoking while he waits, which says everything necessary about how these two get along.

A dead tree, bare and twisted, rises behind him at the right edge and is the only other vertical in the frame. Beyond, the sky is pale cloud over violet-brown mountains, with two more eagles crossing the distance at the upper left as small dark crosses.

Gwaihir the Windlord is the swiftest of the great eagles, and he lifted this particular passenger off the top of a tower when nobody else could reach him. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same birds seen far off above a city.