Sunrise Through a Round Window Over Hobbiton's Fields — Print & Oil Painting

The subject is really the shape of the opening. A brick arch describes a full circle across the whole frame, its coursing laid radially so that every brick points at the centre, and the lens has been chosen to exaggerate the curve: verticals bow outward near the rim and straighten in the middle, so the picture behaves like a bubble rather than a window.

The sun has just cleared the horizon at the left and is caught directly, breaking through a stand of trees as a hard star of white with long spikes running out of it. It bleaches the left quarter of the image almost to paper, throws the trunks into flat silhouette, and lays a warm wash across the flagstones in the foreground.

The middle distance is straightforward farmland: rolling green pasture divided by hedges and shelter belts, a few scattered trees, a pale track, and low blue hills at the horizon. Nothing dramatic is happening in any of it, which is the point of a view from a doorway.

The foreground has been arranged with some care. An irregular flagged terrace fills the bottom, grass pushing up through every joint, with glazed terracotta pots of pansies set on it, ivy and shrubs crowding both edges, and a wooden barrow at the right carrying one enormous orange pumpkin.

An agricultural country with no army, no capital and no ambitions is a strange thing to place at the centre of a war story, and pictures like this are the reason it works. From our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same arch at the other end of the day and these hills painted rather than photographed.