Gandalf Arriving by Cart at a Hobbit Hole — Print & Oil Painting

This is the loosest painting in the group and the most crowded. Almost every square centimetre carries a separate stroke of a different colour, and the picture is held together by tone rather than by drawing: there is scarcely a clean edge anywhere, and several objects are identifiable only by where they sit rather than by their shape.

The cart comes in from the left on two large spoked wheels, pulled by a small brown horse with its head down. On the bench sits a figure in a wide pointed hat with a long grey beard reaching to his lap, painted in half a dozen strokes and completely unmistakable. The bed of the cart behind him is stacked with something bundled and pale which the painter has declined to identify.

The dwelling occupies the middle and is barely drawn at all. A green bank rises across the picture, and set into it are two round-topped openings glowing warm ochre from inside, with a suggestion of a lit interior and a small decorated shape standing in the nearer one. A stone chimney rises from the turf at the right with a bird perched on the pot.

The right third is given to laundry, which is a genuinely unusual choice. A line strung between two poles carries five or six pieces of washing in white, pink and blue, painted as flat rectangles catching the light, with a woven fence and a garden below them. It is the most domestic possible way to establish that people live here.

Across the entire bottom edge runs a band of flowers, red poppies and blue cornflowers flicked in wet over wet against dark grass, and it is the strongest colour in the painting. An old friend arriving by cart with a load of something interesting is how this whole story starts, and it starts in a garden exactly like this one. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same visitor arriving on foot instead and the breakfast at the end of that drive.