The White Council Confronting Sauron in Fire and Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is organised as a whirlpool. Bands of orange, rust and deep blue turn around a single point high in the centre, the rock walls curve with them, and every figure in the picture has been placed on that spiral rather than on any floor. Nothing here stands on level ground, which is a fair way to paint a confrontation nobody is sure of winning.

At the eye of it, raised on a dark seat, sits an armoured shape in a tall spiked crown, one hand closed on a staff. It is painted almost entirely as a silhouette against the fire behind it, with only the crown and the shoulders given any edge, and the flame it sits in opens outward like a mouth. Below the seat the heat pours down a flight of steps in gold and white.

Three figures answer it and none of them is armed. In the middle, on the lowest step, a woman in a pale blue gown stands with her back to us and a white star of light burning at her hands, her whole outline dissolving into that glare. To the left a hooded figure in grey holds a staff tipped with a small blue flame. To the right, much closer to the viewer and much larger, a long-haired figure in rose and lavender leans on a staff crowned with a lamp, hair streaming sideways as though the fire were pushing at it.

It is worth saying that this is a physical painting: the weave of the canvas shows through the thinner passages, the sparks are separate flicked dots of gold, and the two colour families never mix. Warm on the axis, cold at the edges, and one blue tower with a lit window sitting in the upper left corner where the storm has not yet reached.

The Council did assault the dark tower in the south of Mirkwood, and the enemy did leave it. The wrinkle the histories add is that he had already decided to go, so the victory the painting stages as a duel of light was, on his side, a move made in advance. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the enemy studied without any opposition in the frame and the lady of that light with her mirror instead of her hands.