Gil Galad portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The silhouette is the design. A ragged violet-blue cloak leaves the shoulders and tears upward and outward into long torn banners that fill the top right of the frame, and against the flat pale ground behind it those rags read as a single black shape with holes in it. The figure underneath is small by comparison and crouched low, and the eye finds the cloak first every time.

He is caught mid movement rather than posed. One knee is down, the other leg braced back, the torso twisted forward, black hair blown across the face, and the whole weight carried on the shaft of a long spear gripped in the left hand. The armour is violet and blue-grey with pale bracers, a round device set on the breast, and a short skirt of plates over the hip.

The spear is the thing to look at. It runs diagonally from the upper left corner all the way to the bottom of the canvas, and at the lower end it finishes in a long, pale, slightly curved head bound with wrappings, painted a cold bone white that appears nowhere else in the picture. It is the only object in the frame with a clean point.

Around his feet lie two great ornamental plates, bronze and rose, engraved with curling patterns and pierced through, the wreckage of a standard or a shield, and beyond them the ground falls away into a black smear. At the right edge a dark hooded mass stands with a spike above it, unfinished and unexplained. The background is a warm grey haze with a faint row of banners in it.

The spear had a name and the name meant snow-point. It is remembered in the old lists as one of the great weapons of the elder days, spoken of as something nothing could stand against, and its owner was the last high king of his people, who died fighting the enemy in person on the slopes of the burning mountain and left no heir. A portrait built entirely around the weapon rather than the face is the right instinct. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the alliance he led to that mountain and the herald who survived him.