Smaug's Wing Sweeping Low Over Burning Lake-town — Print & Oil Painting

One shape organises this entire painting. A wing enters at the upper left and sweeps down across the full width of the canvas to the lower right, a single long dark red diagonal with a ribbed trailing edge, and every roof, spire and reflection underneath it is arranged in relation to that one bar.

The camera is down among the buildings rather than above them. We are at roof height in the middle of the town, looking along a canal that runs from the bottom of the frame into the distance, and the gables press in on both sides so close that the picture feels enclosed even with a dragon in the sky.

The architecture is worth the attention it gets. Steep shingled gables step back on both banks, several tall spired towers rise between them with finials at their peaks, and small warm lamps burn in windows and along the waterline, doubling in the flat pale water below. The construction is timber throughout and the painting never lets you forget it.

The fire has taken the right half and not yet the left. On that side roofs are fully alight, orange breaking through the shingles and smoke rolling up into a grey-green sky; on the left the town is still cold blue and intact, lamps lit, nothing burning. The line between the two runs straight up the middle of the canal.

Painting the animal as a wing rather than as a face is the smart move: nobody standing in that street would see anything else. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same night seen from far out on the lake and this canal on an ordinary lamp-lit evening.