A Misty Meeting Beside a Mirkwood Waterfall — Print & Oil Painting

Two elves stand on the right bank and their postures are opposites, which is the whole event of this picture. One is at full draw, braced low and wide with the front leg bent, the bow arm out straight and the string pulled back past the jaw, the arrow lying flat across the grip. The other stands upright beside him in a long belted robe with his arms folded across his chest, weight even on both feet, watching without comment.

Both are painted pale against a very dark wood. Long straight hair, almost white, catches the one shaft of light coming down through the canopy at the upper right, and that light also picks out the drawn bow as a thin bright curve. Below the knees both figures dissolve into the undergrowth. Nothing else in the frame is lit to this degree.

The forest around them is enormous and dense. Trunks of great girth lean in from both edges, bearded with moss and trailing vertical vines that hang the full height of the picture; behind them the wood recedes through five or six layers of blue-green haze to a narrow white waterfall dropping in the far distance. A slow stream comes forward from that fall and takes the whole left half of the foreground, painted flat and pale.

The palette is a single family: blue-green, slate, moss, with small punches of violet in the leaves at the lower left and a little olive in the robes. The measured saturation sits in the middle of the range, which for a wood this dark means the colour is present but never allowed to shout.

The elves of this particular wood were the ones who never went west, and the old accounts are blunt about the result: more dangerous than their western kin and less wise, hunters rather than scholars, dealing with the world through the bow and the border patrol. A picture that gives one of them a drawn bow and the other nothing but folded arms and a good view has taken that description seriously. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the king of this wood riding his elk through the same shallow water and an archer of that house drawn at full stretch.