Spock in Victorian Dress at the Card Table — Print & Oil Painting

A strip of green baize runs across the bottom of the picture with a polished wooden rail in front of it, and everything else in the composition is stacked up behind that table. It is a low viewpoint, roughly the eye level of somebody sitting opposite, and it puts the viewer into the game rather than beside it.

Three figures fill the frame against a flat crimson ground. On the left a man in a pale grey blue frock coat, waistcoat and knotted cravat looks down at the cards in his hand with a small private smile, a ring showing on one finger. Behind and between the two men a woman in a wine red gown off both shoulders leans in, auburn hair pinned up, a black velvet band at her throat with a pendant on it, one hand resting on the shoulder to her right.

That shoulder belongs to the third figure, and he is having none of it. Cream suit, burgundy cravat, arms folded high across the chest, the head turned away and down, one eyebrow raised and the mouth pulled flat. The paint is worked in the manner of a commissioned book cover, smooth in the faces, loose in the fabric, with the crimson behind them scrubbed and left deliberately empty.

The detail the picture declines to solve is the ears, and they are perfectly visible. When the series put him in a period costume for real, in a 1967 episode set in New York in 1930, that was the entire problem: the fix was a blue knitted watch cap pulled down over the head and an improvised story about an accident with machinery, offered to a policeman who did not believe a word of it. Nobody at this card table has bothered. Part of our Star Trek collection, alongside a later crew's poker night seen from above and a Klingon officer painted as a nineteenth century general.