The Hobbit Hole at Bag End Beneath a Pink Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

The image is photographic rather than painted, and it is worth saying so, because the appeal is entirely in the fact that the thing exists and can be stood in front of. Every leaf, brick and hinge is real, and the picture is a record rather than an invention.

The door is the centre of it: a broad circle of green-painted boards with a dark central knob, set into a surround of rough stone and brick that has been laid in a curve to match. To its right a second, smaller round window sits in the same wall with a white frame and a plant on the sill, and a small lantern hangs above the lintel with a warm bulb in it.

Most of the surface area is garden, and the garden is doing the real work. Foxgloves, marigolds, lavender and half a dozen unidentifiable cottage flowers are packed right up to the threshold, a flagged path climbs to the door in irregular steps, a low woven fence runs across the bottom, and a plain wooden bench and table sit on a terrace at the left. Turf has been laid over the whole roof and a large tree grows straight out of it.

The light is late and soft. The sky above runs from a clean pale blue at the right through lilac to a band of pink over the hill at the left, and there is just enough of it left to keep the flowers in colour while the doorway falls into shadow.

The species this was built for is defined in the books almost entirely by domestic competence, and a picture that gives four fifths of its area to the vegetable beds and one fifth to the architecture has read that correctly. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside a hobbit sweeping the path to a door like this one and the same doorway looked through from inside.