Orc Armies Surrounding the Walls of Minas Tirith — Print & Oil Painting

The army is painted as a surface. From the left edge to the foot of the walls, filling more than half the canvas, the host has been rendered as a fine dark granulation with no individual figure legible anywhere in it, broken only by lighter dust lanes where the ranks part. It is closer to a photograph of a crowd from a great height than to a battle picture.

Against that mass, the defences are a thin pale line. A low outwork with square turrets runs across the middle distance, and behind it the white city climbs the flank of a mountain in tiers, its stonework crisp and bright and, at this scale, absurdly delicate. Two thin plumes of smoke lift from the walls where something has been landed on them.

The colour is very nearly gone. Grey-brown ground, grey-white stone, grey sky, and a warm dust that unifies everything at the same low saturation. The mountain behind the city is the darkest note in the picture, and the pale ridge of snow along its crest keeps the eye from settling there.

Two winged shapes hang in the sky at the upper left, small, level, unattended, and they are the only things in the image that are not either stone or crowd. The painter has kept them at the size of birds, which is a better decision than making them a spectacle.

What made this siege possible was a wall being lost quietly. There is an outer rampart enclosing the whole townlands, and once it is forced the enemy can bring his whole weight up to the city itself and simply stand there, which is the arrangement painted here: not tactics, arithmetic. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same assault taken up to the walls and the city with the fire already inside it.