Giant King Statues Lining Númenor's Coastline — Print & Oil Painting

The composition is a rhythm. Six or seven colossal figures stand along a receding coastline, each on its own rock pinnacle, each holding a long staff or spear upright in the right hand, and each one smaller and paler than the last as the shore bends away toward a low sun. The picture is built like a bar of music: the same shape repeated at decreasing intervals.

The nearest two are close enough to read. Both are cloaked, both stand with the weight on one leg, and both have the same helmed head and the same vertical shaft; the second has an arm raised outward. After that the figures become silhouettes and then marks, and the furthest are barely separable from the sea stacks they stand on.

The scale only lands because of one detail. At the foot of the nearest crag, on a green shelf at the lower left, stands a single small figure in white and red beside a pale banner. It is perhaps a fiftieth of the height of the statue above it, and everything else in the picture is measured off that one mark.

The weather is doing most of the colour work. A heavy roll of blue-grey cloud fills the sky, opening at the right into a band of gold where the sun sits on the horizon, and mist lies along the base of every headland so the cliffs are cut off from their own reflections. The sea is a flat pewter with a long bright track across it.

What gives a picture like this its weight is knowing that none of it survived. The whole island went under in a single day, and the only thing the old accounts allow to remain above water is the peak of its holy mountain, alone in the sea and visited by nobody. Every statue on this coast is standing on the seabed. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same shoreline under heavy surf and a city of that island painted from the water.