Gandalf the Grey at the Moria Door — Print & Oil Painting

This is a sketch and it has been left as one. The paint is laid down in fast flat strokes with the marks of the tool visible everywhere, the trees are three or four drags of a broad brush each, the ground is scrubbed in, and nothing on the surface has been gone over twice. It looks like a thing worked out quickly to see whether the composition held.

The doorway is pure outline. Arch, columns, crown, seven stars, a pair of trees, a star of many points and a band of script are drawn as thin white lines directly onto the flat blue of the rock, with no interior surface given to the door at all and no shadow cast by anything on it. It is a diagram of a door rather than a door, which turns out to be an oddly faithful way to paint it.

The figure is small and stands off to one side. He is at the right of the arch, in profile, a dark mass with a pointed hat and a staff held upright beside him, roughly a third the height of the opening. He is not touching the door, not reaching for it, and not looking at the viewer. He is simply standing there, which is the correct verb.

Below, a paved shelf and then water. The bottom fifth of the picture is a dark pool with white and pale blue reflections dragged across it in short horizontal strokes, catching the door, the columns and nothing else. Two trees frame the whole scene from the left and right edges, their trunks black and their few leaves put on with the corner of the brush.

The reason he is standing rather than working is written on the arch above him. The inscription tells the reader to speak a word and enter, and the word in question is simply the elvish for friend; the wizard reads the sentence as an instruction to say something rather than as an instruction to say that, and sits outside his own front door for a long time as a result. A painting that shows him beside the arch, doing nothing, has picked the funniest and most human moment in the chapter. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same doorway painted in full dark and the water in front of it once it stops being empty.