Rohirrim Riders Raising the White Horse Banner — Print & Oil Painting

The banner is the centre of gravity. It hangs high in the middle of a square canvas, a pale sheet on a plain staff with a green field and a white running horse on it, and it is the largest single flat shape in the picture. Everything else, riders, spears, dust, has been arranged in a loose ring beneath it.

The emblem is then repeated in the flesh. The two horses given the most attention in the foreground are both white, one at the lower left with its rider leaning forward and one at the lower right cut off by the frame, and their necks and hindquarters echo the shape painted on the cloth above them. A device and the animal it was taken from, in the same frame, is a quiet piece of design thinking.

The handling is loose to the point of shorthand. Faces are two strokes and a shadow, mail is a scribble of grey over brown, a raised sword is a single flick of the brush. Only the banner, the horses' heads and one gold-rimmed helmet at the centre have been finished, and the eye fills in everything else without complaint.

The palette runs from soot to cream through olive and rust. The upper half is dust and pale sky with small dark birds in it, the lower half is a mass of overlapping bodies, and along the far left a range of grey mountains and two small orange fires mark where the ground stops.

The device is exactly right for the people carrying it: a white horse on green, a beast rather than a badge, from a country that measures its wealth in herds and whose kings are buried under grass. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to one of these riders painted at close quarters and the horn and banner carried together.