A Sprawling City of Rhûn Beneath a Golden Sky — Print & Oil Painting

The architecture is the whole reason to look, because none of it belongs to any style the books describe. Tiered roofs with upturned eaves stack on top of one another, bulbous domes sit on drums, slim towers carry finials, and the largest building climbs a rock in the middle distance in four or five stages until it ends in a spire. It reads as a real city with real building regulations, which is more than most invented ones manage.

The composition is a bowl seen from a rooftop. The near edge is a pair of pavilion roofs in the bottom corners, cropped and dark; the ground falls away past them into a walled quarter of low buildings; and the ridge with the great temple on it closes the middle. Beyond that the land opens into a flat plain and a haze of blue mountains.

The light is doing all the emotional work. The sun is behind the city and low, so the whole place is seen against its own glare, with the sky running from white-gold at the horizon through amber to a bruised grey-violet at the top of the frame. Thin columns of smoke rise from several quarters and dissolve into it.

Almost nothing is detailed. Windows are single strokes, the crowds are absent entirely, and the ornament on the great building resolves to a few flicks of pale paint. The city is painted the way a city looks from a mile away in strong backlight, which is exactly the distance that suits a place nobody in these books ever visits.

That absence is the honest subject. The lands east of the inland sea are almost blank in the histories: a name, a coastline, a few peoples who arrive from that direction with weapons, and no cities, no kings, no buildings described at all. Every roof in this painting is the artist filling a silence that the books left deliberately open. Shown in our Lord of the Rings collection with the southern port painted in the same golden backlight and the cavalry that country sends west.