Funny Gollum portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The joke is arithmetic. The skull has been inflated to roughly twice the width of the shoulders under it, and the two eyes are drawn at different scales: the near one enormous, a full grey iris with a pinprick pupil floating in it, the far one shrunk to a narrow slit with a small dark bead. Caricature is measurement rather than cruelty, and the measurements here have been taken with care.

What the arithmetic produces is not funny at all. The mouth is a long down-turned crescent with the corners pulled deep into the cheeks, the brow is furrowed in the middle, and the whole face has settled into an expression best described as sulking. He looks like something that has been told no.

The surface repays a close look. The crown of the head is a web of shallow creases, a few wet strands of hair are combed across it and hang past the ears in separated threads, and the ears themselves are large and thin enough that the light comes through them and shows the blood. The skin runs from olive into brown with pink flushes at the nose and around the eye.

The body is dismissed in half a dozen strokes: one narrow shoulder, a dark rag over it, a hand rising toward the chest, all of it sunk into shadow along the bottom of the frame. Behind, a violet haze supplies the only cool colour in the picture.

He was something close to a hobbit once, and the drawing keeps exactly enough of that to make the exaggeration land. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the version where the sulking stops.