Mûmakil Clashing With Rohirrim Cavalry at Pelennor — Print & Oil Painting

The left third of this painting is architecture and the right two thirds is a stampede. Four or five enormous grey animals come in from the left, each carrying a timber tower two storeys high with rails, ladders and small figures on the platforms, and their legs are the only things in that half of the picture that read as an animal at all. The rest is scaffolding.

Their tusks have been fitted out. Long curved blades are strapped to the ends and cross the space in front of the leading beast in a fan of pale metal, and one of them has been driven low enough to take a horse. The paint is at its most careful exactly there, on the fittings and the harness, and at its loosest on the animals themselves.

The cavalry answers from the bottom right as a churn. Horses in chestnut, roan and grey are packed shoulder to shoulder with spears down, round shields showing edge on, a green banner over them and a black one to the right, and the front of the mass is already inside the reach of the tusks. No single rider has been given a face.

Above all of it the sky is doing something unexpected. A dense wall of brown smoke fills the right half, and through a break at the top corner a low sun throws three or four hard visible shafts down onto the dust. The whole canvas runs from ash grey through olive to a dirty gold, with the measured saturation low and almost all of it in the ground.

The books are clear about the tactical problem and the answer to it. Horses will not face these animals, so the riders went for the men steering them instead; a driver killed by a thrown spear left several tons of frightened animal with nobody on its neck, and one of them came through the field afterwards smashing its own tower and trampling both armies impartially before it disappeared. This picture is painted a minute or two before that. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same field seen from high above with nobody individual in it and a single rider brought up close beneath one of the towers.