Moonlight Reflecting Off Lake-town's Waterfront — Print & Oil Painting

This is the flattest picture in the group and it has been made that way on purpose. The measured contrast is barely a tenth of the available range, which means there is no true black and no true white anywhere: everything sits in a narrow band of olive, bronze and smoke, and the eye has to work at the whole surface rather than being told where to look.

The town has been pushed right out to the left edge and given about a fifth of the width. Its roofs are a dark serrated mass with two towers standing clear, and along the waterline runs a row of small orange lights, ten or twelve of them, doubled immediately below in the water. Everything about the settlement is small, low and crowded into a corner.

The rest of the canvas is lake and sky in roughly equal parts. A pale disc sits low in the cloud right of centre, wrapped in a soft halo, and lays a long broken track of light straight down the water toward the bottom of the frame. That track is the brightest thing in the picture and the only thing with a clear direction.

The land closes both sides. Headlands and a tall stack of rock rise on the right in flat grey silhouette, lower hills run away at the left behind the town, and between them the water opens out toward the light. Cloud lies in horizontal bars across the whole upper third and never breaks.

The moon is not an idle detail in this particular story. The dwarves reckoned their new year by the last moon of autumn, on the day when that moon and the sun could be seen in the sky together, and the side door into the mountain would only show its keyhole on that evening and no other. Everything about the expedition was governed by a date nobody could move. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same waterline seen at dusk without a moon and that mountain reflected in the same water.