Smaug and Bilbo Baggins — Print & Oil Painting

The measured saturation of this image is among the highest anywhere in the collection, and almost all of it has been spent on one metal. Gold fills the bottom third as a sea of individually modelled coins, gold hazes the air behind the columns, gold rims the scales along the top of the muzzle, and nothing cool has been let into the frame apart from a little grey-green in the deepest shadow at the far left.

The head takes up two thirds of the frame and it is seen from close enough to be uncomfortable. It enters from the upper left, muzzle down and forward, and the drawing runs along the jaw in overlapping bronze plates that get smaller as they approach the nostril, with a row of horns swept back from the brow and a fringe of spines under the throat. The jaw is closed. Nothing is burning.

One eye is doing all the acting. It sits deep under a bony ridge at the centre of the head, a narrow amber slit in a ring of hotter orange, and it is aimed down and to the right at something below the frame line rather than out at the viewer. Everything about the posture is attention rather than aggression.

The figure at the right is the size of a thumbnail and is standing on a step beside a dark stone plinth, in a blue coat, hands empty, entirely backlit. The gap between him and the point of the muzzle is about a third of the width of the picture. Behind him a ruined arcade climbs into a bright haze that never resolves into a wall.

The reason the animal is awake at all, in the book, is a single cup. The burglar takes one piece off the top of the pile and is out of the tunnel before anything moves, and the loss of it is noticed immediately, because dragons keep an inventory of their own hoards down to the last item and hold a grudge in proportion. A painting that renders every coin separately has quietly made the same point. From our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same hall lit from the floor upward and the same head brought down to ground level.