Minas Tirith Ablaze Beneath a Night Siege — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is almost entirely dark and it uses that darkness as a material. Measured brightness is very low, the bottom third of the canvas is a black empty plain with nothing painted in it at all, and every event in the image has been pushed up into a thin bright band across the middle. You are watching a siege from a long way out, on foot, in the open.

Four tall towers stand along that band at regular intervals, each one a slim dark silhouette with orange light showing through slots in its side, the nearest at the left and the furthest small and pale near the city. They are the only vertical objects on the plain, and their even spacing is what turns a scene into a plan.

The city itself is at the right, built against the black flank of a mountain: walls picked out in dull gold where they are burning, a gate blazing white-hot at the centre of the lit area, and the higher tiers only readable as a scatter of small fires going up into the dark. Streaks of flame with long tails cross the air between the towers and the walls in both directions, some rising, some falling.

Above everything the sky is a deep bruised violet, thick with cloud, and it holds no moon and no stars. That absence is the most deliberate decision in the picture: with no light from above, every glow in the image has to be something that is on fire.

The dark in this part of the story is not weather. A shadow is sent out from the east that swallows the sunrise and holds for days, so that the defenders lose track of the hour and fight without any dawn to work toward. A night siege with an empty sky is the exact illustration of it. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same darkness rolling in over the city and the ram that eventually opens that gate.