Sauron's Eye tower collapses, The Return of the King — Print & Oil Painting

The brightest thing in the picture is the thing that is ending. High at the centre a white-gold ellipse flares at maximum intensity, wrapped in a dark curling form, throwing light out into the smoke around it, and everything below it is in the act of falling apart. It is a painting of a lamp going out at its brightest moment.

The tower beneath is breaking rather than broken. Its upper masonry has already separated into dozens of black fragments that hang in the air on either side of the shaft, still roughly in the shape of the structure they came from, and lower down a ring of battlements and a smaller round turret are still intact enough to read as architecture. Nothing has reached the ground yet.

Colour is limited to a single narrow range and pushed hard. Every part of the canvas is some version of red: crimson in the deep smoke, a hot orange where the cloud is lit from within, a dull brick in the shadows. There is no blue, no green and no neutral anywhere, and the effect is closer to being inside a furnace than to looking at a sky.

Two black silhouettes anchor the lower corners, spiked and jagged, one on each side. They are close to the viewer, entirely unlit, and their only job is to frame the collapse and remind you that the structure had neighbours.

What makes the moment work in the story is that the fall is not caused by anything visible in it. The tower comes down because something very small has been dropped into a fire a long way off, and the whole apparatus turns out to have been one object. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same tower intact and burning and the eye still watching over a country it holds.