Dawn Light Streaking the Mountains Above Minas Tirith — Print & Oil Painting

This one is frontal and very nearly symmetrical, which is a different proposition from the three-quarter views of the same city. The tiers rise in the centre of the canvas as a broad stepped pyramid, wider at the base and drawing in evenly on both sides, with a single tower and a smaller keep on the top platform. The whole arrangement sits square to the viewer, like a building photographed for a record rather than for a story.

Seen from this angle the great spur of rock becomes a dark vertical stripe. It runs from the top platform straight down the middle of the city to the wall at the bottom, unlit and almost featureless, cutting the pale tiers into two mirrored halves. It is the strongest shape in the picture and it does the work a spine does.

Behind everything stands a wall of mountain, and this is where the paint gets loud. The rock has been laid in with broad wet strokes and dragged, and across it run diagonal streaks of hot yellow and white where the light catches the faces, some of them a third of the width of the canvas. The handling is coarse, fast, and clearly enjoyed. Cloud smears through the upper left in the same manner.

The bottom fifth is a flat ochre plain with one straight paler line running across it to the gate, and nothing else at all. That emptiness is doing structural work: it isolates the city, gives the eye a run-up, and keeps every detail in the top two thirds.

The light is correct, which is worth noticing. That city was built facing east, with its back set against the mountain, so a sun rising over the viewer's shoulder would strike the rock wall behind it exactly as it does here, leaving the tiers themselves cool and the cliff blazing. The city spent an age looking in one direction, and this painting has us standing in that direction looking back. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same spur seen from the side in grey mist and the same wall of rock with a rider arriving at the gate.