Data in a Classical Renaissance-Style Portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The ground is doing old work. A warm grey-brown fills the whole panel, lightening just behind the head and darkening steadily toward every edge, which is the device portrait painters used for four centuries to lift a face off a wall without drawing a line round it.

The finish is extremely smooth. There is no visible stroke anywhere in the skin, the transitions run long and gradual, and the flesh has been painted a warm gold-ochre rather than the pale gold of the screen version, so it reads as a Renaissance complexion first and an artificial one second. The irises are yellow. The hair is combed flat and back with a hard edge at the temple.

The head turns three quarters to our left and the eyes travel a little further, past us and out of the frame. The uniform is black with a mustard yoke, three small studs at the collar and a badge low on the chest, and below the shoulders everything sinks away into the dark.

Then the mouth, which is very slightly up at one corner. That is the whole picture. The old masters used exactly this expression to imply an interior life going on somewhere behind the paint, and applying it to a character whose interior life was the longest open question in the series is either a joke or an argument, and works as both. From our Star Trek collection, and he is one of the players in The TNG Crew's Poker Night from Above.