An Elven Ship Docked at the Grey Havens — Print & Oil Painting

Gold has been allowed to take everything. The sun sits low and out of frame behind the harbour, and its light has flooded the stone, the water, the sail and the air itself, so that the picture runs almost entirely on one hue and separates its objects by value alone. The measured saturation is among the highest in this group and it is all invested in that single colour.

The ship is moored and not going anywhere yet. She lies broadside to us against the quay, a single mast with a broad tan sail hanging slack from the yard, a long hull with a high stem rising into a carved prow, and a row of shields or oar ports along the strake. Ropes run down to bollards. Nothing about her posture suggests movement.

On the quay at the left stand two carved figures on square plinths, robed, facing the water, cut off at the ankles by the edge of the composition. They are the same height as a person and they are placed where a person would stand to watch. Behind them the buildings of the harbour are pure haze: columns, arcades and towers dissolved into the glare with no detail surviving.

The water takes the bottom third and it has been painted with the calm of a closed dock, worked in horizontal strokes with the reflection of the hull broken into short bars beneath it. There is no wind in the sail and no wake anywhere on the surface.

Every hull in that harbour came out of one yard. The shipwright who ran those quays had been building on that coast since the First Age and he stayed at it to the end, sending others west and putting off his own passage until there was nobody left to sail. A picture of a finished ship, tied up, fully rigged and perfectly still in the last of the light, is a portrait of his working life rather than of anyone's departure. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same harbour with a ship already under way and a torchlit procession coming down to that water.