Nazguls and Frodo at Amon Hen — Print & Oil Painting

The whole sheet is one colour. Every value from the deepest shadow to the brightest haze is a shade of moss green, and the only exception is the gold of the lettering printed across the bottom. Working an entire poster in a single hue is a way of saying that what we are looking at is not being seen with the eyes, and the choice pays off.

The design is a staircase of sizes. At the bottom, small and close, a hooded figure with dark curls sits with his back to us on broken pavement. Above and beyond him rises a hooded shape ten times his height, crowned, one arm bringing a long blade down and across. Behind that, ranged in an arc, five more hooded figures with straight swords held upright, each smaller than the central one and larger than the hobbit. Nobody has a face.

The ruins are barely there and that is the point. A few courses of cut stone at the left, a flight of steps, a slab of pavement underfoot and a dark arch of foliage closing the top of the frame: enough to establish that this was once a built place, not enough to say which. Everything past the first rank of figures dissolves into vapour.

The lettering has been treated as part of the artwork rather than dropped on top of it. The title sits in gold across the lower fifth, a line of elvish script runs beneath it edge to edge, and a plain gold circle is set at the centre of that line, at the exact bottom of the vertical axis the whole composition is built on.

The place named in the title is a hill with an old stone seat on it, and what happens there in the book is a vision rather than an ambush: the Ring goes on, the world opens out, and the search comes looking. The Nine are elsewhere at that hour, and the company on the hilltop is broken up by orcs out of Isengard rather than by wraiths. Read as what the wearer sees rather than as what is standing on the grass, the picture is exact. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the nine of them assembled and standing still and the small object that produces this view.