Uruk-hai Warrior Surrounded by Gondor Soldiers — Print & Oil Painting

Lightning is the light source and the whole picture is built on it. Hard white-green bolts fork across the background at three points, and everything in the frame is lit by that instant: rims of cold green along every shoulder and helmet, deep black in every hollow, and rain drawn as fine bright diagonal scratches over the entire surface. There is no other illumination anywhere.

The figure in the middle is losing. He stands square to us with his arms hanging and his weight settled back, a heavy dark cuirass over a long mail skirt, and at least four shafts have gone into him: two through the chest plate, one high in the right shoulder, one across the ribs. His hands are still open at his sides. His helmet is on and his face is in shadow under the brow of it.

The men closing in are the ones with the heraldry. Half a dozen soldiers press in from both edges in mail and tall helms, blades drawn and held low, and the nearest of them at the left wears a surcoat with a white tree spreading across the chest, drawn clearly enough to count the branches. They are painted slightly out of focus, which puts the wounded figure alone in the sharpest plane.

Colour has been pushed almost out of the image. Everything is a cold blue-green, from the armour to the rain to the mud underfoot, and the only breaks are the white of the lightning and one small dull red mark on the central figure's side.

The pairing is not a film invention. Great black orcs first came out of the east in the middle of the Third Age and took the river city from Gondor, and the war between the two of them was already four hundred years old before any of the events of the main story. From our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same breed drawn up in rank and file and the city they took, seen long after.