The Witch-king of Angmar Wielding His Blade — Print & Oil Painting

The wall behind the figure has been allowed to run. The entire back of the picture is a curtain of vertical streaks, green-grey dragged down over a darker green, where wet paint was pulled toward the bottom edge and left to do as it liked, and the drips carry on across the shoulders. The result is a portrait that appears to be dissolving while you look at it.

The composition is very nearly symmetrical. A tall iron crown sits at the top centre with five uneven points rising from it, the shoulders below spread into a ragged black mass of cloak and mail, and the figure faces us square on. Under the crown the painter has put nothing at all.

The band around the brow is worth stopping on. It carries a row of incised angular characters cut into the metal at even intervals, too stylised to resolve into any script yet unmistakably intended as writing. Somebody put a legend across the front of that helmet, and the picture does not translate it.

The blade is the only warm object in the frame. Raised in the left of the picture, it is a pale brass-gold with a notched edge and dark inlay running down the fuller, and it reflects nothing from the scene around it, as though it were lit by something else entirely.

He had been promised, a long time before, that no man would ever bring him down, and he ran the rest of his career on the strength of it. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same figure standing in open fire.