Uruk-hai Army Massed Before Orthanc at Isengard — Print & Oil Painting

You are not looking at this army so much as looking through it. Nine or ten pikes and banner poles stand in the immediate foreground at wildly different angles, close enough to the lens that their timber grain and iron collars are legible, and every one of them is cut off by the top or bottom of the frame. The picture is composed as though the viewer were standing in the third rank.

Beyond that screen the host runs to the horizon in both directions. It is handled as a dark granular texture rather than as figures, with a scatter of small torch flames caught in it, and above the mass rises a second forest of spears so dense that the individual shafts stop separating perhaps a third of the way back.

The tower is dead centre and it is the only thing in the image with straight lines. Four black shafts rise as a single mass and split at the summit into horns, the surface ribbed with tiers of narrow openings and dark balconies, and the whole thing is silhouetted against the one pale break in the weather. Nothing surrounds it. It stands on the plain like a chimney on a moor.

The sky occupies the top half and does most of the emotional work: a heavy roll of grey and green-grey cloud, lit from within at the centre, closing down at both upper corners. The colour throughout is cold and slightly bilious, and there is no true black in the picture except in the tower.

The tower was not built by the wizard who is remembered for it. It is much older work, raised by the Men of the West when their power reached this far, and he arrived as a tenant with the keys handed to him. Everything black and industrial about the place is a later addition to a building that had been standing empty and undamaged for centuries. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same muster printed in sepia and motion blur and one of those helmets brought up close.