Rohan cavalry knight portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The horse composes the picture. It is white, rearing, both forelegs off the ground and the neck arched hard to its own chest, and it fills the entire lower two thirds of a tall canvas. The rider is smaller than his mount in every dimension and is arranged around it rather than the other way round.

The heraldry appears twice and is worth reading. A round shield on the left arm carries a white running horse on a dark green field, and the same green with gold borders is repeated in the caparison over the horse's hindquarters. Above it all a long green pennant streams from a spear, painted with a gold device and a swallow tail, held up at the very top of the frame.

What both hands are doing is the point. The right holds the spear and its banner high; the left has lifted a curved horn to the mouth guard of the helmet and he is blowing it. Neither hand is on the reins and neither is on a weapon. This is a man calling people rather than fighting anyone, which is a far less common subject than it should be.

The setting is quiet by comparison, and deliberately so: a broad green valley, blue mountains stepping back on both sides, a heavy overcast sky, wildflowers in the turf. Along both edges, small and easily missed, columns of other riders are already moving, and a scatter of birds lifts off at the right.

A people whose entire strategy is the ability to arrive somewhere quickly needs a way of gathering, and the horn is it. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the muster he is summoning and the same white horse carried into the field.