The Four Horsemen of TSR art

I'm a Gen X guy who remembers the 80s like it was yesterday sometimes. I have a fruitful albeit complicated relationship with the OSR, but mostly fruitful and friendly. The OSR and I are friendly acquaintances at least, if not close friends. One of the ways in which I'm sympathetic to the OSR is in preferring older style art to the technically adept but completely bland, soulless and very bright, polite, colorful and child-like stuff that is common today. D&D illustrations have, at the very least, lost their edge, look like DEI nonsense, and are generally not as good as older 80s and even 90s style illustrations; the only improvement is that the move to full color books for most things, which happened under WotC starting with 3e in 2000 is, well, obviously a technical improvement from the B&W interiors of the earlier material. 

That said, my relationship with the earlier artwork is also complicated. There were four big in-house artists during the heyday of TSR, Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson and Clyde Caldwell. Prior to that, we had the likes of Dave Trampier, Erol Otus, Jeff Dee, and others. But the previous four were usually considered the Four Horsemen, or the Big Four, or whatever. Larry Elmore did the covers for the BECMI line of D&D boxed sets. While those aren't my favorite boxed sets, those definitely are my favorite covers! He also did the covers for the original Dragonlance trilogy novels. That means that to me, of course, he's the most iconic of all the TSR artists, and my favorite. I also particularly like how he painted dragons, like the ones in the BECMI art, so yeah. I bought an older D&D novel specifically and only because it had the same image as the Companion set as the cover, and I liked that cover so much that I wanted a novel based on it.

I also currently have t-shirts with the Basic and Expert cover art on them too. Elmore is super iconic to D&D and to fantasy as I envisioned it as a kid as a whole. I'm now less likely to go for the high fantasy image of fighters or knights fighting dragons with oversized magical swords, but I still love the imagery of it. Elmore also did, for what it's worth, the cover art for the Star Frontiers game, so he was equally iconic in the (admittedly much smaller) world of space opera gaming as he was in fantasy.

Clyde Caldwell is another great illustrator of the Big Four. He did a lot of stuff, including a bunch of novel and module covers. What I think of him most as, however, is the covers for the Gazetteer series of Known World (Mystara) setting material. But this piece, which is cropped, and which was the original cover for an early Forgotten Realms novel called Spellfire is probably my favorite Caldwell piece.

Keith Parkinson also did some stellar work. I wasn't as much a fan of his iconic dragons, like the cover to Dragon Magazine #1, but he did some other really great stuff. His work "Lord Soth's Charge" might be one of his most iconic pieces, and deservedly so. It's excellent. Undead may have been his specialty even. 

Parkinson also did some pretty iconic work outside of D&D, like the covers for the EverQuest boxes, some iconic other work for trading cards, other novels (he did one version of the iconically stupid but also bestselling Sword of Truth for instance). He also died relatively young (47) of cancer over twenty years ago.

Jeff Easley was the last of the Four Horsemen, and the one that I never could really get in to. He had some good art, I suppose, but he had a lot of stuff that I never liked. I especially associate him with the covers for late 1e books, like Manual of the Planes and others of that same vintage, the 2e covers, and other D&D-line products of the same vintage, like the various "Classic Dungeons & Dragons" boxed sets from the early 90s and the Rules Cyclopedia version. His monsters in particular looked weird and fleshy. His style was much more distinct from the other three, and his work is easier to spot, for the most part. I don't want to dog on him, but I just don't like his style as much.

Now, one of these days, I'd like to outfit a home office with prints of some of the best artwork available from this era. I've long thought that I'd like to have five or six pieces. Four of them would be the first four from the BECMI line; Basic, Expert, Companion and Master. Master I could possibly do without, but the other three are super, super iconic to me. What else to round off the list with is up for grabs still. Maybe even something more modern, like this Wayne Reynolds one. I have a high resolution image that I grabbed back when it was available (probably off of ENWorld or the WotC website, but maybe Waybe Reynold's own before he converted it to lower res versions) that I could literally make my own high quality print of if I wanted to.

Add to that my equally high resolution Pathfinder 1e cover art, which is similar in style, and I'd be cooking with gas.

My relationship with Pathfinder is even more complicated still. I've never actually played it, technically, but of course, it's a relatively modest revision of the 3.5 rules. At least, on the same level of modest changes as 3.0 had to 3.5. Because I played a lot of 3e and 3.5, I feel like Pathfinder 1e is very, very familiar to me. I have a lot of products from that line. Most of them, in fact, at least in digital form, and quite a few in physical form. But I probably wouldn't want to play or run them in their own native system; I'd convert them to whatever D&D-like system that I'd otherwise be running. Probably, if it were really all that D&D-like, an E6 3.5, or even something less D&D-like, like my own Old Night system. But that's no different than my attitude towards any version of D&D or it's product, and for all intents and purposes, I consider Pathfinder (all versions, but especially 1e) to merely be a slight variation on D&D anyway.

In the case of that artwork, it's less about it being super iconic and more about it being a good piece of art that I happen to already have in high resolution format, though, because I could extract it from my copy of the PDF.