Elven Archers Standing Watch Over Rivendell — Print & Oil Painting

A row of black figures stands along the bottom of the picture with their backs to us, and not one of them has a face, a colour or an edge. Ten or eleven of them, evenly spaced along a low green shelf, several with a bow held up at arm's length, all of them looking into the valley. Because they are lit from behind they read as holes cut in the landscape rather than as people standing in it.

Everything past them is gold. The light comes from deep in the valley and slightly to the right, hazing the cliffs, catching the mist off the water and bleaching the middle distance, so the picture has a bright hollow centre with dark edges all the way round.

Two structures hold the sides. On the left, on its own outcrop, a cluster of steep-roofed halls with a round tower, small and pale and set behind a fall of water that drops the full height of the canvas as a thin white curtain. On the right, much closer, a long hall with tall pointed windows and a steep dark roof, its interior burning warm yellow through the glass. Between them the gorge falls away.

Branches and leaves hang into the top of the frame from a tree the viewer is standing under. It is a small device and it does a lot: it puts us in the trees with the archers, on the same side of the valley, watching the same thing.

This valley is not a retreat, whatever its reputation. It is held: the household rides out, the fords below it are guarded, and the river itself has been arranged to rise against anything that tries to cross when it is not welcome. Painting the residents as a line of armed silhouettes against their own lit windows is closer to the truth than a picture of a feast. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to those windows painted from the other side of the gorge and the water defending the ford below.