Mysterious Lights Flickering Deep in a Night Forest — Print & Oil Painting

This is the darkest picture in the whole group and its lightness measurement sits at one tenth of the scale. There is no sky, no horizon, no ground and no light source that can be looked at directly. What there is instead is an interlocking mass of branches and trunks in violet-black, filling the frame corner to corner, with things glowing inside it.

The lights come in three kinds and the picture is careful to distinguish them. There are tall pointed windows in ranks, pale blue and green, set along the branches where a building has been fitted in. There are hanging lamps: one large ovoid at the upper left with a ribbed shell and a bright interior, and smaller ones further off. And there are loose round orbs of blue-white, two dozen of them, floating free at every depth.

The architecture is present but never explained. A row of arched openings runs along a horizontal limb at the centre right and simply stops; another cluster of lit windows sits in the branches at the left with no roof, wall or approach shown. The wood has been painted as a place where buildings are glimpsed rather than seen.

Ivy and creeper hang across the middle distance in loose dark strands, and a pale vertical fall of light at the centre right may be water or may be more lamps. Nothing in this picture has been given an outline, and nothing in it is at rest.

The people living outside this wood had views about it. The riders of the grass country called it a place of illusion, said that anyone who went in came out changed if they came out at all, and their king had to be persuaded that the lady who lived there was not a sorceress. None of them had been. A picture of unaccountable lights in a black wood is a fair rendering of what the neighbours thought was going on. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same wood with one lit structure in full view and the city glowing through mist at a distance.