Gandalf Strolling Past Sunflowers Toward a Hobbit Hole — Print & Oil Painting

Almost nothing in this picture is the colour it would be outdoors. The turf runs from a lemon yellow along the lit crest of the hill to a bottle green in the hollows, the sky is a flat unbroken cyan with cumulus stacked into the upper left, and the whole surface has been carried two or three steps past what an afternoon actually provides. It is an illustrator's green rather than a landscape painter's, and it sets the register for everything else in the frame.

The hillside is not scenery. It is a worked property, and the picture keeps producing evidence of that: a flight of stone steps climbing from the path to the door, low retaining walls terracing the slope into beds, a wooden picket fence with its gate standing open at the bottom right corner, a small wheelbarrow tipped on its side in the grass, a sawn stump, and flowers planted right up under the windows. Sunflowers as tall as a man lean into the lower left corner and face the viewer rather than the sun.

The dwelling is set into the slope and only its faces show. A round green door with iron bands and a central knob sits in a brick surround under a carved stone lintel, with two round windows and one oval one spaced away to the left, all of them glazed in small panes. An enormous tree grows directly above the roof and its roots run out over the top of the doorway. On a garden bench beside the beds, a small figure with curly brown hair sits with arms folded and legs crossed, doing nothing whatsoever.

The grey figure is the smallest thing in the composition and he is seen from behind. Pointed hat, staff in the right hand, cloak hanging straight, he is down on the dirt path in the middle distance with his back to us and to the door, walking away from the hill and down toward the river and the blue hills. The title has him arriving. The picture, quite clearly, has him leaving.

That reading suits the place better than an arrival would. The country he is walking out of ran itself for centuries with no army, no tax collector and almost no government: a mayor whose main duty was presiding at dinners, a few Shirriffs who mostly rounded up stray livestock, and a postal service that did more real work than any of them. The gardening in this picture is the serious business, and the wizard on the path is the visitor. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside another green hillside door painted without a soul in front of it and the same traveller stopped under an oak to look at this country.