Dobby the House-Elf in Dramatic Light — Print & Oil Painting

The ears arrive before the face does. Two enormous grey-green blades stand almost horizontally off the skull, veined and thin enough at the edges to let light through, and they set the width of the entire composition. Everything else is arranged beneath them.

Then the eyes, the size of plums and set very wide, green at the rim and pale blue towards the centre, wet and slightly reflective, aimed up and past the viewer at something above the frame. The mouth is a small firm line. The expression is neither fear nor pleading. It is closer to attention.

The garment is the point of this character and the picture treats it correctly: one piece of coarse grey cloth, knotted over a shoulder and hanging like a sack, hem uneven, grubby in the folds. In this story a house-elf wears the household's cast-offs and is released only when a master hands over a piece of clothing, so the pillowcase is at once uniform and predicament.

The light splits the head down its length: cold blue across the left cheek and ear, warm amber down the right, the background falling off into a brown so deep it takes the shoulders with it. The skin is rendered photographically, down to the pores and the fine creases at the temple, which makes the scale of the head harder to dismiss. From our Harry Potter collection, alongside the hippogriff on the woodland path.