Minas Tirith Rising From the Mist in Grey Light — Print & Oil Painting

The city is built on a blade, and this is the version that shows it. A pale wedge of rock drives out of the hillside at the left and runs forward through the whole stack of buildings, its near face flat and unbroken, its leading edge sharp enough to divide every level it passes. Nothing else in the picture has an edge like it.

The architecture behind it climbs in stages, and it has been drawn rather than suggested. Blocks of pale masonry step up the slope in tiers, each with its own walls, arcades, doorways and small square windows, until the whole mass narrows to a group of towers and one slender shaft with a fine spire. The paint gets thinner as it goes up, so the top of the city half dissolves into the light.

Colour has been held to almost nothing. Grey, bone, dust and a dry ochre carry the entire canvas, with a single pale sun burning through the cloud at the upper left and a mountain flank behind, snow-streaked and blue-black. The measured saturation is low and the picture is better for it: at this reading the stone looks like stone and not like marble in a catalogue.

The foreground is given to two humble things. A low outer wall runs across the bottom of the frame with square towers along it at regular intervals, and in front of that a band of dry standing grass, painted stalk by stalk in the last few centimetres of the canvas. That grass is what tells you how far away the city is.

The rock in this painting is the detail the text is proudest of. The books describe that spur as standing out from the hill with its edge sharp as the keel of a ship, carrying the topmost circle on its back, and they make the road tunnel straight through it and double back at every level, so that anyone climbing to the top passes through the stone seven times. A painter who gets that wedge right has got the city right. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same rock seen end on at dawn and the same fortress treated as an old photographic plate.