The Ruins of Helm's Deep Bathed in Sepia Light — Print & Oil Painting

The bottom fifth of this picture is nothing at all. Below the crowd the surface simply goes to a flat unbroken black with no ground, no shadow and no edge in it, so the fortress and its besiegers appear to be standing on the top of a page that has been left blank. It is the boldest decision in the image and it is what gives the design its weight.

The format fights the subject and wins. A stronghold like this is a horizontal thing, a wall and a gate and a tower in a line, and it has been squeezed into a tall upright frame, so the elements stack instead of spreading. A slim tower with a curved buttress climbs the left edge, a heavy gatehouse with an arched opening and a portcullis sits at the centre, a second gate stands to the right, and a rock face closes the top corner.

The colour is one pigment thinned to different strengths. Everything is a warm sepia brown, from a bleached bone at the lit edges of the masonry to a near black in the sky, and the whole surface carries a heavy speckle and a scatter of scratches, as though it had been reproduced badly and printed anyway. A single fire burns behind the tower at the left and is the only light source given.

The host at the foot of the wall is painted as texture and not as figures. Several hundred small pale marks are spread across the lower middle of the picture, and above them stand many hundreds of fine vertical scratches, which are pikes. Nothing in that mass resolves into a body, a face or a banner. It is a granular field with an army's density and an army's outline.

The title calls these walls ruins, and they are not: they are standing, garrisoned and about to be tested, with the assault already arrived at the gate. What the defenders have behind them is worth knowing, because the story spends more affection on it than on the battle. The caves under the fortress are enormous, unmapped and full of rock that throws back torchlight, and a dwarf who goes in there to shelter comes out talking about them for the rest of his life. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same walls painted in cold sea green and the valley with nothing happening in it.