Gandalf the Grey at Bag End — Print & Oil Painting

We are outside looking in, and the round door frame does the composing. A broad timber circle sweeps across the whole left side of the canvas, cut by the frame at top and bottom, and the room beyond is seen through it as if through a lens. The frame is the nearest object in the picture and the only one painted with hard edges.

Inside, the wizard has run out of headroom. He stands full length in a dark robe with a grey mantle over it, long beard, hair falling forward, and his right arm is raised so that the flat of his hand rests against the ceiling above him. The gesture is not magical and it is not theatrical. It is what a tall man does in a low room.

The colour is one continuous ochre. Walls, ceiling, floorboards and door frame all run through cream, honey and burnt yellow, with the only cool notes coming from a small stained glass window at the centre and the grey of his clothing. The hearth is behind him at the middle of the wall, low and glowing dull red, with a shelf of books, jugs and a candle beside it.

The domestic detail is exact and unhurried. A wooden chair with a rush seat and a folded cloth on it, a stack of leather-bound volumes lying flat, a straw basket, a brass jug, the mantel above the fire. Nothing is happening in any of it. The room is being lived in and the visitor has just come through the door.

That door has a history the painting does not show. On his first visit here he stood outside it, put the spike of his staff to the green paint and scratched a sign into it, which the owner read as vandalism and thirteen dwarves read as an address. Everything in both of the long stories begins with a mark on a front door and an old man too tall for the corridor. Kept in our Lord of the Rings collection with the same two sharing breakfast at that table and the arrival by cart at a hobbit hole on another day.