Gandalf Riding Toward Minas Tirith Beneath Grey Clouds — Print & Oil Painting

The format is doing something clever. This is a tall narrow canvas, and instead of the panorama the subject invites, the painter has stacked the picture vertically: a wide band of dry ochre field along the bottom, the city and the mountains through the middle, and a soft grey-green sky filling the top third. Well over half the surface has nothing in it.

The palette is effectively two colours. Everything on the ground is cream, sand and pale bone; everything in the sky is a cool grey-green; and there is no third hue anywhere. It gives the whole image the look of a hand-pulled print rather than a painting, and the city, built entirely out of the pale tones, appears to be made of the same material as the field it stands on.

That city has been drawn with real care at a small size. The tiers step back correctly, the great spur of rock divides the lower levels, the outer wall runs across the base in a long curve with a row of small buttresses, and the white tower stands clear of everything with a slim spire. It is legible at a glance and rewards a close look.

The rider crosses the lower right on a white horse at a brisk trot, staff carried out at an angle across his body, robes catching the wind. He is small but not tiny, and he has been placed as far from the city as the frame allows, so the empty field between them becomes the real measure of the picture.

At the top of that city, in a walled court beside the tower, stood a dead white tree that nobody removed. It had been dry for generations and was still guarded day and night, because the line of kings and the line of trees had run out at the same time and the city preferred to keep the corpse rather than admit it. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same journey with the sun breaking through and the same city printed as an old travel poster.