Soldiers Bearing the White Tree Marching in Formation — Print & Oil Painting

One shape is repeated until it stops being decoration and becomes a headcount. A white tree, thin trunk, branches thrown out sideways and up, is painted on the face of every shield in the front rank, on the shields behind them, and again on the great banner that fills the upper right of the frame. Small pale stars are scattered above it each time. Nothing else in the picture is allowed to compete with that mark.

The helmets do the rest of the work. Every man wears the same gilded shell with a low brow band, a nose guard and a pair of upswept wings at the temples, and the artist has let the metal take almost all the light in the image, so the ranks read as a row of bright points above a wall of dark shields. Between them, spear shafts go up at slightly different angles and cross each other into a thicket.

The faces have not been idealised. Beards, weathered skin, mouths closed, eyes forward and slightly down: half a dozen individual heads are legible in the front two ranks and then the crowd swallows the rest. Nobody is shouting. It is a formation waiting rather than a formation advancing.

The surface itself is worth noticing. The whole image carries a fine granular texture and a slight softness, closer to a photographic plate than to brushwork, and the colour has settled into a narrow band of olive, pewter and dull gold with a bleached grey sky behind the standards.

The device those shields carry is not just a plant. The tree belongs to the kingdom, the crown above it to the king, and the seven stars around it go back to the ships that came out of the wreck of the island, one star for each vessel that carried a seeing stone. A painting that puts the same emblem on forty shields is saying something exact about what these men think they are: not an army with a badge, but a badge with an army attached. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to one soldier of the same people braced alone behind sword and shield and the tree itself painted bare on a flooded plain.