Númenor's City Lights Glowing at Night — Print & Oil Painting

The subject is a thousand small warm lights and one large cold building. Windows, lamps, quays and bridges are picked out across the whole width of the valley in points of amber, dense along the waterfront and thinning as the ground rises, so the city is described entirely by where people happen to be awake.

The tower on the right is the exception and it dominates by refusing to join in. Slender ribs of pale stone rise the full height of the frame and close into a pointed crown, two tall traceried windows glow a deeper gold through their glass, and a robed statue stands out from the tower's face at mid height with its arms lowered. Everything about it is cooler and more finished than the city below.

Water runs through the middle of the composition and doubles the whole show. A broad channel crosses the frame, crossed in turn by a lit bridge on several arches, and every lamp along its banks comes back off the surface as a long broken column of light. A domed structure at the lower right sits with its own ring of lamps around it.

The land beyond is painted in very deep blue-greens: wooded slopes, a ridge, then mountains under a night sky that carries cloud but no moon. The whole image has a low measured brightness and a high measured saturation, which is exactly what happens when a picture consists of small intense lights on a dark ground.

There is one thing missing from that sky. The people who built this place were guided to their island by a star set in the west, and they steered by it, named their kings after it and looked for it every evening. A night view of their capital with an overcast sky and no star in it is either an accident or the sharpest thing in the picture. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same coast in daylight from the air and the towers seen from the wall above them.