Sauron, Frodo, Sam and Gollum — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is a joke about scale and it takes a few seconds to land. What fills the frame is a colossal figure in black plate, seen from below and cropped at the waist, with a horned helm at the top of the canvas, twin slits of orange fire where the eyes belong, and molten red seams running down every join in the armour. Only after you have taken all that in do you notice that there are people standing on it.

The nearest of them is at the centre, on the back of an enormous armoured gauntlet. He is a small barefoot figure in a brown tunic and a red belt, bent forward under a load, holding a short blade upright in both hands, and clinging around his neck and shoulders is a second smaller figure with reddish hair whose bare legs hang down. One of them is carrying the other.

Higher and to the left, perched on the point of one of the armour spikes, crouches a third: pale, hairless, thin as a bundle of sticks, knees up around its ears, staring down at the pair on the hand. It is painted in flat greys and given no shadow of its own, and it is the only figure in the picture that looks comfortable up there.

The drawing is comic-book work in the best sense. Hard black inks, flat colour, cross-hatched greys in the sky, and a strict palette of charcoal, red and bone. Two winged shapes circle at the upper left, a bank of grey cloud fills the whole background, and cracked lava runs across the bottom edge under the armour.

The carry is the one thing in the composition taken straight from the page. On the last slope, with the strength gone, the gardener picks up his master and walks up the mountain with him, and finds that the burden is lighter than he feared. Putting that gesture on the back of the enemy's own hand is a bold way to stage it, and the arithmetic of the picture is the arithmetic of the book. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same carry painted straight and the three of them at the fire.