Travelers on the Path Beneath Rivendell's Waterfalls — Print & Oil Painting

The same walk has been painted twice in one frame. On the bank at the right, four small figures climb a red earth path in a loose group; further down the same path, forty or fifty yards behind and considerably smaller, a fifth walks alone. Nothing separates them but distance, and the effect is of a single journey shown at two moments, with the picture quietly running a little ahead of itself.

Everything on the canvas has been brought into one warm key. Rose, apricot, cream and a dusty gold cover the mountains, the cliffs, the sky, the roofs and the grass, and even the shadows are laid in with warm violet rather than anything cold. The travellers' cloaks are the only cool notes in the whole composition, which is why four figures a centimetre high hold their corner against a valley.

The water is where the paint is thickest. A broad fall drops in three stages down the centre of the picture into a pool at the bottom, and it has been put on with a heavily loaded brush in ridges of white, cream and pale grey that stand proud of the surface; further falls come down the cliff at the far left as thin threads. The rest of the canvas is comparatively smooth.

The halls sit on the left cliff with arcaded fronts and orange-tiled roofs, catching the light along their upper edges, and a low stone bridge crosses the gorge above the main fall. On the right, more roofs among trees, a slim tower, and a flock of birds strung across the sky. The bank in the foreground is scattered with small pink flowers painted in single touches.

The house is not on the road. The great highway east runs across the country some way north of here, over a bridge that was old before this story started, and the turning down into the valley is easy to walk past; travellers arrive in twos and fours, on foot, having been told roughly where to look. A painting that gives the path more attention than the gate has understood how people get here. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same water with a single figure standing in it and another arrival on foot at the end of a long day.