Elves Gathered in a Moonlit Stone Courtyard — Print & Oil Painting

The whole image has been scratched. Every surface, floor, pier, vault, foliage and mist, is covered in fine hatched lines running in several directions at once, laid over a cold blue-white wash, and the technique never lets up for a moment. It gives the picture a nervous, frost-bitten texture that has nothing to do with the calm of the scene it describes.

The architecture is an open gallery. Pointed arches on slender piers run away to the left in two ranks, opening onto a valley of pale trees and fog, while a much heavier arch springs across the right of the frame. The floor is flagged, wet-looking, and a low round basin sits at the centre of it with a stepped rim.

The figure that dominates is not alive. Carved into the near pier, at twice human height, stands a woman in a long robe with her hair falling in ribbons past the waist and a plain disc set behind her head like a moon. She is finished more carefully than anything else in the picture and she is looking down at the floor where the living figures are standing.

Those figures are almost incidental. Three or four of them, one in a pale hooded robe, one in white, one dark, spaced well apart in the middle distance and drawn at perhaps a tenth of the height of the statue. None of them is doing anything and none of them can be identified. The picture is quite deliberately about the room rather than the meeting.

A house where the carvings outnumber and outlast the residents is the correct emblem for this people at this point in their history: everything of theirs is older than the errand at hand, and most of their halls are memorials to events nobody present witnessed. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same house painted warm and lit and the lord of it standing ready for war.