Gandalf the White on Shadowfax Helm's Deep — Print & Oil Painting

The rider has been placed exactly on the light source. A sun is coming up through the gap between two dark cliffs, dead centre, and the small white figure on the small white horse stands directly in front of it, which makes him simultaneously the brightest and the least legible thing in the picture. He is a silhouette with the light coming through him rather than onto him.

The measured contrast on this canvas is the highest in the group and the design lives on it: two near-black rock walls closing the left and right edges, and between them a flare of gold that washes out everything it touches.

The rays come down the slope toward the viewer as long visible shafts, and the rider throws a shadow that runs the whole depth of the field and arrives at the bottom of the frame. That shadow, not the figure, is what gives the picture its distance.

Along the very bottom edge stands a row of dark spear and pike points, cropped, close and out of focus. They put us down in the ranks of whatever is waiting on the lower slope, looking up at a hilltop with the sun behind it.

The horse under him is Shadowfax, chief of the mearas, who let no other man ride him, and the arrival at first light is the one the defenders had been told to expect. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same arrival painted down among the fighting.