Sunlight Streaming Over Rivendell's Central Waterfall — Print & Oil Painting

There are lamps burning behind the waterfall, and once you have seen them the picture will not be about anything else. Down the left third a broad fall drops in overlapping veils from the top of the frame, and set into the rock behind it, seen through the moving water, are four or five warm orange openings at different heights. The valley has been hollowed out and lit from inside, and the water is a curtain hung across the front of it.

The bridge on the right answers that with a single gesture. It leaves the near cliff, crosses the entire gorge in one long shallow arc without a pier, a strut or a visible thickening anywhere along its length, and lands among the roofs on the far side. It is the flattest arch in the collection and it looks like something poured rather than built.

Between the two sits the architecture, and it has been given a long low horizontal to work along: an arcade of pointed arches running the width of the centre, a terrace above it, steep green-grey roofs behind, and a slender spire rising at the back. More falls come out from directly under the terrace and drop into a gorge the picture never shows the bottom of.

Light enters from a pale sun low in the far centre and comes forward through the haze as visible beams, crossing the gorge diagonally and catching the spray, the top of the arcade and the near edge of the bridge. Autumn foliage in rust and amber crowds both cliffs; an old tree leans into the upper left corner with its roots in the rock above the fall.

This is a house people are carried into. A hobbit arrives at these gates with a splinter of a Morgul blade working its way toward his heart, is unconscious for four days, and the master of the house takes the fragment out and finds it already melting; the patient wakes up in a warm room with the water audible through the window and no memory of the last stage of the road. A picture with lamps lit behind a waterfall is painting a hospital as much as a palace. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside a company crossing a bridge in this same gorge and the golden halls above the falls.