Minas Tirith in Flames During the Siege of Gondor — Print & Oil Painting

The subject of this painting is a wall, and the wall is enormous. It crosses the entire width of a very wide canvas, built of close-set vertical stone shafts like a palisade cut out of rock, stepping up in height toward the right until it meets a mass of masonry that leaves the top of the frame. Square towers stand behind it at intervals, and one pale tower rises above everything else, holding the last clean light in the picture.

Along the top of that wall runs a line of small fires, evenly spaced, the whole length of it. That row of lights is the finest thing here. It describes the entire run of the defence in a single stroke, it tells you the wall is still manned, and it gives the eye an unbroken path from the left edge to the right.

Two things are going wrong. At the centre a broad section of the wall walk is burning hard, an orange bloom of flame and smoke spreading along the parapet. At the right a siege ladder stands against the stone with fire climbing it and another lies fallen below. Directly beneath the burning section a tall engine with a long pale arm has been caught mid-throw.

The bottom third is the host. Thousands of torch flames cover the ground from edge to edge in an unbroken orange carpet, packed so densely that no individual figure survives, with siege towers and standards standing out of it in silhouette. Brightness across the canvas is very low and effectively all of the saturation belongs to fire.

Worth being exact about what is shown: this is not the seven white tiers of the city, and Gondor had another wall for it to be. The Rammas Echor ran right around the townlands of the Pelennor, and at the opening of the siege it was manned, overrun and broken, its defenders driven back from it toward the gates. The city burns later. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the white city itself under attack and the ram brought up for its gate.