Lake-town's Rooftops Mirrored in the Still Water — Print & Oil Painting

The most interesting things in this panorama are in the shallows in front of the town, and they are dead. Along the bottom left and bottom right corners stand the remains of much older structures: a stone arch broken at the crown, a run of masonry piers, a cluster of black timber stumps snapped off at the waterline, all of them furred with snow. The living town is a thin band across the middle distance. The ruins are the things nearest the viewer.

The town itself has been drawn as one long horizontal accumulation. Several hundred steep shingled roofs, a scatter of towers with conical caps, a red-brown tone throughout, and no single building given precedence over any other. It sits directly on the water with no shore anywhere, and the whole line of it is perhaps a fifth of the height of the picture.

Mist is doing the work that light usually does. It lies on the lake in loose horizontal banks, thickest at the left and right edges, and it separates the composition into three distinct planes: open water in front, town in the middle, mountain behind. The title promises a mirror, and the water is in fact too broken up by vapour to reflect much of anything.

Behind everything stands a single snow-covered peak with a notched summit and a long spur running down to the right, pale grey-blue, considerably higher than any other landform in the frame. The colour is uniformly cold: slate, tin, and a faint green in the deeper water, with the roofs supplying the only brown.

Those broken piles are in the book and they are given a sad little explanation. Back when the city up the valley was rich, a much greater town stood on this water, and in calm weather with the lake low its rotting foundations could still be seen. The people living on the new one were quietly aware that they were the smaller successors of something better. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the river that runs from that peak down to this town and the same timber gates seen close up under snow.