The blade that was broken — Print & Oil Painting

An abstract shape has been dropped into the middle of a battle painting and left there. At the right of the canvas, a wide ribbon of flat cobalt blue twists through the air in two loops, entirely without modelling, shading or texture, and a long grey spear shaft passes across it. Everything else in the picture is worked in soft, tonal, thoroughly traditional oil. The ribbon belongs to a different painting and the artist has clearly decided that is the point.

The scene under it is a defeat. A man in pale scale mail lies on his back across a slope of dark ground, propped on one elbow, and the whole weight of the composition rests on his raised right arm and the sword in it. The blade is short, white and catching a burst of light at the tip, and it is not the length that hilt implies. Behind and beneath him, three or four more armoured bodies lie tangled together, faces turned up.

The thing that killed him occupies the upper right. It is a huge dark mass, half armour and half smoke, with a horned crest and a pale glint where a face would be, and it has been kept deliberately unfinished so that it never quite separates from the storm behind it. Below it, along the right edge, the ground burns a dull yellow.

The rest of the canvas is weather. Blue-grey cloud is dragged in broad strokes across the whole upper left, a mountain range shows faintly through it, and a shaft of cold light comes down onto the fallen man and nothing else. The paint is thin, the drawing is loose, and the only crisp objects in the frame are the sword and the blue ribbon.

The title names the object rather than the man. The sword breaks underneath its owner as he falls, his son takes up the piece that is left and cuts the ring from the enemy's hand with it, and the shards are then carried unmended for three thousand years until a rhyme about a broken blade being renewed finally comes due. A painting of the exact second the weapon fails is a painting of the hinge the whole history turns on. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to what the son does a moment later and the heir who eventually carries it whole.