War of the Last Alliance Isildur vs Sauron — Print & Oil Painting

The largest single shape on the canvas is a cloak. It hangs from the enemy's shoulders on the right and spreads outward and downward in a ragged black mass that takes up nearly a third of the surface, torn along every edge into long tapering points, and it does more to establish the scale of him than his height does. Underneath it the armour is black plate with a spiked pauldron, a horned helm and a long hafted weapon raised at the top right corner.

Against that, the only cool colour in the picture is cloth as well. Two blue banners fly on tall staffs above the host at the left, painted in a clean cobalt with a device picked out in white, and they are the single note in the entire composition that is not brown, ochre, rust or black. Everything the allied army wears has been dulled down to the colour of the ground.

One figure has broken out of that army and is alone in the gap. He is at the centre in silver mail with a red cloak streaming behind, a winged helm, a sword up and back, both feet off the line, and he is perhaps a fifth the height of the shape he is running at. The distance between them is about two body lengths and there is nobody else in it.

At his feet lies a body, and the picture is careful to place it before rather than after him: armoured, face up, one arm out, already still while the charge goes past. Behind everything a volcano stands at the centre of the horizon throwing red into a bruised sky, and the ground is littered with fallen spears and dead orcs painted loosely enough to read as debris.

The sequence being compressed here takes an hour and ends an age. The alliance had been sitting outside that tower for seven years before this; when the enemy finally came down, he killed the elven king and the man's king in single combat, and the man's sword broke underneath him as he fell. The son picked up the broken hilt from the ground his father was lying on and cut the ring off the hand with the piece that was left. The body in this painting is the reason the charge is happening. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the instant the sword fails and the same confrontation with more of the company in the frame.