A Hobbit Sweeping the Path to His Round Door — Print & Oil Painting

The paint is thick and the tools are visible. Ridges of colour stand up off the surface in the grass and the roof turf, the flowers have been dabbed on with the corner of a loaded brush and left as raised blobs of red, and the flagstones of the path are laid in as separate flat strokes with the ground colour showing between them. Nothing is glazed and nothing is smoothed.

Three circles are set into the hillside and they are not the same size. A green door with a dark central knob sits at the middle, a smaller round window with a teal pane sits to its right, and a third opening at the left is dark inside. All three are ringed with a broad surround of orange-brown brick that has been painted in a much hotter colour than anything else in the picture, so the front of the hill reads as three warm rings pressed into a green bank.

The figure is doing housework. He stands on the path with his back mostly to us, brown curls, a white shirt with the sleeves up, braces over dark breeches, no shoes worth mentioning, and both hands on a besom of bound twigs which he is drawing across the flagstones. His weight is on the forward foot. It is an entirely ordinary action, painted at the same size and with the same seriousness as the house.

The path leads the eye out. It runs from his broom away to the left, down between banks of red flowers and a young tree, and two much smaller figures are walking along it in the middle distance toward a green rise under a cloudy blue sky. The picture opens outward rather than inward.

Sweeping a path is exactly the sort of activity these books put at their centre and then defend for nine hundred pages, and painting it in this much impasto is a way of taking it seriously. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to another door painted in the same thick hand and a whole terrace of these doors on one slope.