Gandalf Gazing Over the Shire From Beneath an Oak — Print & Oil Painting

The tree is the architecture of this picture. A great oak stands at the right edge with its trunk running the full height of the canvas, and its lowest branches reach right across the top of the frame in a horizontal sweep, so the entire view is seen through a low green arch. Take the tree away and the composition collapses.

Under it, on the grass slope, one figure stands with his back to us: a long grey cloak, a soft pointed hat, a staff planted at his right side, shoulders relaxed. He is not walking, arriving or leaving. He is standing still and looking, and the painting is content to let him do it for as long as he likes.

The valley beyond is inventoried rather than sketched. Green hills fold away in three or four ranks, hedges divide them into small irregular fields, a lane runs down to the left, and set into the near slope are round doors and round windows with a scrap of blue paint on one of them. There are no people down there at all.

The colour is soft and slightly faded, low in saturation and high in value, with pale lilac and cream cloud built up over the far hills. It is the palette of a picture remembered rather than observed, and the handling everywhere is fine and patient, with the grass in the foreground drawn blade by blade where it catches the light.

The country below has no idea how much attention it gets. Its borders are quietly patrolled by rangers who are never thanked and generally not liked, and its safety is a thing arranged elsewhere by people the inhabitants would not recognise. A painting of a wizard standing above the valley, watching it and not going down, is a fair picture of that arrangement. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same figure on the lane below and a whole row of those doors in one hillside.