The Lonely Mountain Erebor Beneath a Rose-Tinted Sky — Print & Oil Painting

Only one object in this picture is lit. The peak stands at the centre with its snow catching a low rose-gold light along every south-facing plane, and everything else in the frame, the forested ridges below it, the shoulder to the right, the water along the bottom edge, has been left in an unlit slate blue with almost no detail recovered. Four fifths of the surface is in shadow and it has been allowed to stay there.

The summit is a fist of bare rock. It rises out of a collar of cloud in a set of hard vertical faces, split by a deep notch at the top and buttressed by ribs that run down into the snowfields, and the whole formation is noticeably steeper than the ridges around it. Nothing about it is gentle and nothing about it is inhabited: there is no gate, no road, no smoke and no structure anywhere in the picture.

The sky is where the colour lives. A clean teal blue occupies the upper corners, and across it are drawn long horizontal streaks of cloud lit salmon pink from beneath, thickening into a bank on the right. The clouds are painted with soft edges and real internal shading, and they are the only things in the picture besides the peak that receive the light.

The bottom sixth is water and it is nearly black. A broad flat expanse runs the width of the frame with a scatter of pale marks across it that read as floating ice, and a dark shoreline of trees cuts across the left. The scale is stated by nothing at all, which is part of why the mountain reads as enormous.

The name is not poetic licence. This peak has no range attached to it: it stands up alone off the edge of the eastern plain with open country all around, which is precisely why a kingdom chose to fortify it and precisely why, several centuries later, something with wings and an interest in defensible property chose it too. A single mountain with one door is a good address for anybody who intends to keep what is inside. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same peak glimpsed over a misty forest and the town that lived in its shadow.