A Torch Glowing Beneath Khazad-dûm's Towering Pillars — Print & Oil Painting

One torch, and it has been given the smallest space the composition could spare. It burns at the very bottom of the frame, dead centre, a warm point perhaps the size of a pinhead on the canvas, with two or three tiny figures gathered around it. Everything above and around them is unlit stone, and this is by measurement the darkest image in the entire group.

The columns are colossal and their scale is stated by cropping. Two of them fill the left and right thirds of the canvas, rising out of the bottom edge and running up out of the top of the frame, so their height is never established and cannot be. Between them a pointed arch springs across the middle distance, and behind that another, and behind that nothing that can be resolved.

The carving survives just at the limit of vision. Bands of relief run round the column shafts at intervals, panels of geometric work rise up their faces, and the capitals carry a dense repeating pattern, all of it emerging by a few tones only where the light happens to reach. Half the ornament in this picture has to be inferred, which is exactly the experience being described.

The palette is a single warm brown taken from near black to a dull ochre, with no other colour anywhere. There is no cold light, no second source and no sky. The eye is given nothing to do except climb from the torch upward into progressively less information.

This is what the crossing is like in the book. A company goes through these halls with one small light among them, the roof is never visible, the walls come and go, and their guide will say only that the hall is vast and that they are not to leave the road. A painting that puts a pinpoint of fire under two columns of unknown height has understood the assignment better than any wide lit view of the same room could. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same columns with a crowd and a captive beneath them and the doorway at the far end of all this.