Shadowfax Carrying Gandalf Across the Pelennor Fields — Print & Oil Painting

Two thirds of this painting is sky and grass, and the transaction between them is the whole appeal. The sky is worked in wet grey-blue and white with real cloud structure, heavy at the left and breaking toward the centre; the field below is a broad band of ochre and green laid on in loose horizontal strokes. Between them, small and dark, runs a hedge line and a low wall.

The city sits on the right, painted with far more patience than anything else in the picture: a spur of grey rock carrying seven tiers of pale masonry, a needle of a tower at the summit, the outer wall curving away toward the viewer, and behind it a wall of mountains in cold blue-grey with snow in the high gullies.

The rider is at the bottom left corner, tiny. White horse, white robe, staff carried upright, and the pair of them are moving at a walk rather than a gallop, with the horse's head low. There is no urgency in the picture at all, which is an unusual reading of this particular journey.

The measured saturation is among the lowest in this group and the surface behaves like watercolour: thin, transparent, with lighter passages left as bare ground and the edges of the clouds allowed to bleed. Nothing has been overworked.

The horse deserves the title it gets here. He is chief of a breed that only the kings of the horse-country were permitted to ride, faster than any other animal in the story, and he was given away in a moment of temper by a king who had been badly advised. He bears no saddle and answers to his name rather than to a bridle. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same ride painted in a tall narrow frame and dawn coming up on the mountains behind the city.