A River Winding to a Town Below the Lonely Mountain — Print & Oil Painting

The land in this painting is almost black. Ridge, valley floor, flanks and foothills all sit within two steps of the darkest value on the canvas, and only two things are permitted to be light: the sky, and the water running through the middle of the dark.

That water is the whole composition. It begins as a thin white fall dropping from high on the mountain's face, gathers at the base, and then snakes toward the viewer in a series of loops that widen as they come, holding the salmon and cream of the sky as flat reflected patches. The eye is walked from the summit to the bottom edge along it without ever being given an alternative route.

The town is very nearly hidden. Low on the right of the valley floor, a small dense scatter of dark marks with a few pale roofs sits beside one of the river's bends, no larger than a thumbprint, with a faint suggestion of a track running out from it. It is easy to miss on a first look and it changes the picture once found.

Above, the sky does all the colour work: banks of salmon and coral cloud laid in loose horizontal strokes over a cool pale blue, with a warmer gold pooling behind the summit. The snow cap picks up that warmth and is the only bright thing in the upper half that is not cloud.

Settlements in this part of the world sit where the water is, and the water comes down off this particular mountain, which is why its fortunes and theirs have never been separable. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same water painted with a boat on it and the town at the far end of that river.