Theoden at Minas Tirith — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is cut straight across the middle and the two halves are given opposite work. Above the line everything is smoke: black columns climbing out of the walls, a bruised ceiling of cloud, one pale break of light behind the towers. Below it everything is dry and still: a flat plain of bleached gold grass running all the way to the gates, with nothing standing on it.

Nothing except one rider. He sits a pale horse at the exact centre of the field, sword lifted straight above his head, and he is painted small enough that the raised blade is a single stroke. He is also the only shape that crosses the join between the smoke and the grass, which is the whole reason the eye finds him.

The foreground has been given to the men who are not moving. At both edges, cropped by the frame and far too large, stand helmeted figures seen from behind, black and softened, with long spear shafts rising past the top of the picture and a horse's head lower left. They are not characters here. They are a doorway built out of soldiers, and we are standing inside it.

The city itself is a stack of white tiers with a needle rising from the top, and the fires have been placed carefully: three separate bites of orange eating into pale masonry at three different heights, so the damage reads as spreading rather than total.

The king of Rohan brought his riders south because Gondor asked, and the picture holds the second before the horns. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same king already at the head of his line and the city painted from much closer in.