A Shadowy Figure Looming in the Halls of Erebor — Print & Oil Painting

Darkness is the material this picture is made of rather than the condition it is painted in. The measured lightness is among the lowest anywhere in the collection, and the artist has used that as a positive quantity: whole square metres of the surface carry no information at all, and the few things that are legible have been rationed out across them like lamps along a road.

The hall is enormous and it is stated by three devices only. A row of piers and arches recedes down the right side into black. A shaft of pale green daylight comes down from a gap high in the rock at the centre. And two heavy iron lanterns hang on chains at the top corners of the frame, close enough to the viewer to be out of focus, which puts us inside the space rather than looking into it.

The looming figure of the title is carved. Set into the rock at the far end of the hall, lit by that one shaft and by nothing else, is a colossal seated or standing effigy of which only a shoulder, an upper arm and part of a head survive the gloom, greenish and eroded, with the rest of it dissolving upward into the cavern. It is masonry, not a person, and the picture is careful never to let it resolve.

Running through the black rock everywhere are thin veins of hot orange, branching like roots down the piers and across the ceiling. Nothing else in the hall carries any heat at all, and they are not lamps: they behave like mineral seams lit from inside the stone. Along the bottom of the picture a long stone quay with a railing crosses the whole width, and on it three or four minute figures walk, one in a pale robe beside what appears to be a bench of goods.

The people who cut this hall had already lost two homes before they started on it. The line came out of the great delving in the Misty Mountains after something woke there, went north into the grey ranges, was driven out of those in turn by dragons, and settled at last under this particular peak. A kingdom on its third address builds deeper and lights it worse. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside a company crossing the treasure hall of the same mountain and the town on the water that lived off this trade.