A Ship Sailing Beneath Númenor's Harbor Statue — Print & Oil Painting

We are underneath something enormous and looking out from beneath it. A vast stone vault fills the top and both sides of the frame, its underside coffered and its inner face carved with standing figures in high relief, and it is so close and so dark that the eye reads it as the roof of a cave rather than as architecture. The whole bright world is out there in the opening.

A single ship is passing through, close to the left pier and dwarfed by it. Two masts, a high curved prow, a row of small figures at the rail, and a great tan lugsail set in battened panels, catching light along its lower edge. It is the only moving object in the picture.

Beyond the arch the harbour opens into a white city built on a headland: terraces, aqueduct arcades, quays, stairs cut into the rock, and small sailing boats scattered across the bay. Standing above all of it on the cliff is a colossal robed figure with both arms raised and open, carved in the same white stone as the buildings, its head level with the highest roof. A conical mountain stands in the far distance at the right.

The light is the ordinary light of a bright day with high cloud, which is a brave choice. There is no sunset, no dramatic beam, nothing atmospheric: just clean daylight on white stone, and the drama left entirely to the difference in scale between the arch, the statue and the ship.

Building at this size was a symptom. As the kings of that island grew more afraid of dying, their monuments grew heavier, until an enormous part of the country's labour was going into tombs and images rather than into ships and fields. A painting where a working vessel is a tenth of the height of a decorative statue has caught the disease in progress. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside one of those colossi seen from the open sea and the kind of tomb the same builders were making.