The Snow-Covered Gates of Lake-town at Night — Print & Oil Painting

The front door of this town is a portcullis over a canal. A heavy timber lattice has been lowered across the channel at the centre of the picture, framed by a gatehouse with a stone arch beside it, and there is no road, no threshold and no ground: to get in you would have to come by boat and wait for the grating to be raised.

Everything is lit from inside the buildings. A dozen small windows burn orange along both sides of the channel, lanterns hang on brackets from the near corners of the frame at left and right, and smoke lifts from three or four chimneys. None of that light reaches the water. The channel itself stays a cold blue-green with pale plates of ice scattered across it and mooring posts standing up between them.

The architecture is half-timbered and thoroughly northern: steep tiled roofs with a heavy load of snow, exposed frames with plaster panels, projecting upper storeys, external stairs, a small footbridge with a turned rail crossing above the gate. A watchtower with an open lantern stage rises behind the roofs at the left.

The sky is the surprise. It is a clear luminous teal, several values lighter than anything below it, with the smoke drifting brown across it, so the whole town reads as a dark cut-out against a cold bright night. There is no moon in the frame and no star.

Arriving here was a formality even for people with nothing to declare. The town could be reached by a long wooden bridge from the shore, and at the end of that bridge stood a gate and men whose job was to ask questions; when a soaked and unannounced party of dwarves turned up at it claiming to be royalty, the guards did what guards do, which was to send for somebody more senior and let them stand there dripping. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same ice in a narrow channel at twilight and the day the town turns out in numbers.