A Nazgûl Rider Passing Through Bree Forest — Print & Oil Painting

The forest floor has been given more attention than the rider, and that inversion is what makes the picture work. Along the whole bottom edge the artist has drawn clumps of pale mushrooms in three or four species, curled ferns, wet moss over exposed roots, dead bracken and a fallen branch, each one described in fine dry strokes. The horseman above them gets a fraction of that care.

He is a silhouette with a hole in it. Black cloak, black hood, and inside the hood a shape that has simply been left empty, without a shaded jaw or a suggestion of a chin to soften it. His hands are not visible. He sits still and upright while the horse walks, and the cloak falls in heavy folds down the animal's left flank without stirring.

The horse is where the drawing is best. It is a dark bay in a studded harness, near foreleg lifted in a slow walk, head carried low with a rolled blanket strapped behind the saddle and a brow band caught by the light. It is described as a working animal, right down to the wear on the leather, and it is entirely unbothered.

Colour has been drained out almost completely. The measured saturation is very low and it shows: bare trees in grey and bone climb the whole height of the frame, the mist behind them is white, and the only real colour is the green of the moss and a faint russet in the fallen leaves. The technique is dry and hatched throughout, closer to tempera than to oil.

The first part of the story is a manhunt in exactly this kind of country. The Riders come up the roads asking villagers for a name, and the danger in those chapters is never a charge or a duel: it is a rider passing along a lane at walking pace while somebody lies still under a bank a few yards away. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same figure treated as an old photographic plate and the wet streets of the town he is riding toward.