Swans Soaring Above Númenor's Coastal City — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is taken from the air and the birds are at our height, not below us. Five of them cross the middle distance with wings fully extended, painted in opaque white over the blue of the water, and the nearest is large enough to show the separation of its primaries while the furthest is a white comma against a headland. Everything else in the image is a long way down.

The city sits on a promontory at the lower left, and the paint there is finer than anywhere else on the sheet: white terraces and colonnades stepping down the slope, domed roofs, a green public space, an avenue of trees, and a curved harbour wall reaching out into the water like an arm. A dozen long dark boats are drawn up along it, each one no longer than a stitch.

The water is the real subject and it has been given every blue in the box. Deep ultramarine in the channels, a pale jade where the shallows run over sand, silver where the light strikes, and a cold grey where the cloud shadow crosses it. Headlands and small islands recede into the top of the sheet through five or six planes of mist.

The handling is watercolour throughout, with the white of the paper reserved for the swans, the surf and the buildings, and the sky at the top left left almost bare. It is a technique that suits a picture with this much water in it, because the light is coming through the paint rather than off it.

An island shaped like a five-pointed star, with long promontories running out into the sea and a bay between each pair, is what the old descriptions give, and an aerial view of headlands and inlets is the only way to make that legible. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same coast in bad weather and a haven of the same kind on the far shore.