The Forgotten Tree of Númenor — Print & Oil Painting

The tree is a light source. It stands alone at the centre on a flooded plain, entirely bare, and every branch and twig of it has been painted in a pure luminous white that lifts clear of the pale blue behind, so that the crown reads as a spray of cold sparks rather than as timber. Nothing else in the picture is anywhere near that value.

Two dark cliffs frame it like the wings of a stage. They rise the full height of the canvas at both edges, close to the viewer, in cold grey rock with tufts of dry grass on their ledges, and they are the only things in the image with real weight. Between them the ground opens out into shallow standing water, mist and low reed banks, and the eye is walked straight down the middle to the trunk.

The distance is stated in three flat steps: a sharp dark peak just left of the tree, a range of paler blue hills behind it, and a clean unclouded sky above. Each step is lighter and cooler than the one before, and none of them carries any detail, which is what makes the space feel large.

Scale arrives at the last moment. Two red deer stand in the shallows at the right, a stag with a full head of antlers and a hind beside him, both small and both facing the tree. They are the only living things in the frame and the only warm colour in it.

The tree the title names had a real place in the story: a white tree in the king's court on the island, from which a fruit was saved before the whole thing was cut down and burned, and every White Tree of Gondor afterwards descends from that rescue. Painting it as a bare survivor standing in water, with nothing built anywhere near it, is a quiet way of showing what happened to the country that owned it. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside ships coming into that island's harbour while it stood and the coast it presented to the sea.