Deer Grazing Before a Distant Elven Citadel — Print & Oil Painting

The picture has neither a moon nor a treetop sanctuary. It is a daylit forest with two deer in it: a young stag standing alert on a mossy bank at the base of an enormous trunk in the left foreground, and a second animal grazing at the lower right beside the water. Both are drawn small, carefully and with no drama at all.

The wood itself is the real subject and it is described with unusual attention. Bark texture, hanging moss, ivy on the trunks, fern and grass on the bank, the litter of the floor, a scatter of pale flowers: every plane of the left half has been given surface, and the light coming through the canopy is broken into a hundred small warm patches on it.

The city is on the far side of a river and it is built up a cliff. Pale spires and towers rise in a tight cluster along the rock face at the right, gold in the low sun, half wrapped in mist that comes off the water below them, and behind everything a range of grey snow-covered peaks stands against a bright hazy sky. The distance from the near bank to the towers is considerable and the picture never tries to close it.

Colour separates the two halves cleanly. The forest is a deep saturated green with brown and moss in it; the city and the mountains are a pale gold and blue-grey drained almost to white. The river between them, running out to the lower right corner, belongs to both.

An animal grazing in the open with a city in plain sight is the right note to end this country on. It was never taken, never surrendered and never sacked; what happened to it instead is that the war ended, the thing preserving it stopped working, its lady sailed and its people drifted away west and south, and within a single human lifetime there was nobody living in it at all. The trees stayed. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same country after dark and the water that runs down through those woods.