Thranduil's Crown of Autumn Leaves and Antlers — Print & Oil Painting

The crown is made of dead wood. It is not metal at all: bare twisted branches rise from a band at the brow and interlace into a nest of points, several of them forking like small antlers, and among them sit clusters of red and amber berries and a few curled leaves going over into brown. It is a wreath that has been left on too long, and that is the intention.

The hands are the second subject and they have been given as much care as the face. Both are raised in front of the chest, holding a slender blade upright by the grip, the fingers long and slightly splayed, and on three of them sit heavy silver rings with pale stones. The nails are pale. The blade between them is a plain narrow line of steel running out of the top of the frame.

The mail is worth the attention it gets. It is a fine silvered weave with a faint scale pattern, close-fitting through the forearm and shoulder, catching light in small broken glints rather than in broad sheens, and over it lies the flood of white-blond hair that takes up the whole right side of the picture.

Behind him the wood is dying. A whole hillside of bare grey trees fills the left half of the frame, painted twig by twig with no leaf on any of them, running back into a green haze, and at the top right a dark broken structure sits on the ridge under a heavy overcast sky. The only healthy green in the picture is the low scrub at the very bottom.

His expression is worth the price of the piece: brows down, eyes hard and turned to the corner, mouth level, an aristocrat being told something he does not intend to act on. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same king presented in his court robe and his son, drawn at the moment of the loose.