Gandalf the White coming to Minas Tirith — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is built out of three flat bands and nothing else. Along the bottom, a plain of dead gold grass running edge to edge. Above it, a city of bone-white stone stacked in tiers. Behind that, a mountain of unrelieved black rising out of the frame at the left with cloud pouring off its shoulder. Warm, cold, dark: three horizontal decisions and the whole composition is settled.

The city has been painted as geology rather than architecture. Its walls follow the contour of the spur it is built against, each ring set a little higher and a little further back than the one below, with towers, buttresses and roof lines crowding every level, and the whole mass reads at this distance as a cliff that somebody has carved. One slender white tower rises clear of everything else at the summit and is the brightest object in the frame.

The grass in the foreground is the second best passage. It is dry, pale and knee high, painted in short upright strokes that darken toward the bottom edge, and it takes up nearly a third of the surface. Nothing grows in it, nothing is cultivated, and the low outer wall of the city runs across its far edge with a gate in it.

The rider is minute. He is at the lower left, seen from behind, white on a white horse, no taller on the canvas than the grass is deep, and he has been placed so that the entire diagonal of the plain leads from him to the gate. There is no visible saddle and no visible bridle. He is the only thing in the picture that is moving.

At the top of that white tower there is a courtyard with a fountain in it, and in the courtyard stands a dead tree, guarded day and night by men in black and silver who have never in their lives seen it in leaf. It had been dead for generations and nobody was permitted to remove it, because the line it belonged to had not formally ended. That is the city this rider is bringing bad news to. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same walls seen in grey weather and the same ride painted under heavier cloud.