Media: Gouache on illustration board
Dimensions:
66 cm × 54.5 cm
(495 limited edition prints were produced, but they have since sold out.)
First appeared in the 1990 Tolkien Calendar, published by HarperCollins. (It was the painting for June.)
Used as the cover for some editions of The Hobbit.
Painted over many months (off and on), this painting was deliberately envisioned as a more realistic treatment of Tolkien’s own watercolour from The Hobbit, somewhat in the tradition of the Hudson River school of landscape painting, but incorporating an ambitious amount of detail like the magic-realism artists of the ’60s and ’70s.