Rivendell's Golden Halls Amid the Waterfalls — Print & Oil Painting

The whole painting runs on one colour opposition and it is pushed as far as it will go. Every built thing is gold, from pale straw through honey to a deep amber in the shadows under the eaves. Everything not built is teal: the cliffs, the water, the far gorge, the shaded conifers. There is no third colour of any consequence, and the two of them sit opposite each other on the wheel, which is why the halls appear to be lit from inside even where nothing is lit at all.

The bridge across the middle is the spine of the design. It is carried on five or six low arches and roofed with a running arcade of slender pointed hoops, one after another, so that the eye travels its whole length in a series of beats and arrives at the buildings on the far side already moving. Underneath it the gorge drops away into white water.

Ornament has been allowed everywhere and it never repeats. Steep gables carry pierced tracery at their peaks, galleries run on rows of thin columns, a spire at the far left splits into a crown of curved fingers, and a small domed pavilion sits by itself on the right-hand cliff. There must be a dozen separate roof lines in the picture and no two are the same pitch.

Water falls at five or six different depths, and the layering is what makes a small canvas feel deep. Two veils come out from directly beneath the buildings, a long thin one drops down the cliff at the far right, and behind everything a broad pale fall comes down through the haze at a distance the painting refuses to specify.

The figures are almost a footnote and should be looked for. On the arched bridge at the right, a short line of small dark shapes is crossing in single file, each about the size of a comma, and their scale quietly triples the size of everything else. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same spire rising through golden mist and the valley cradled between its own cascades.