If you were into fantasy during the 1970s, you were almost certainly familiar with the artwork of Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, generally known as the Brothers Hildebrandt. Today, they're probably most remembered for their various Lord of the Rings calendars (the first of which appeared in 1976) and the covers to the Shannara novels of Terry Brooks, but I suspect the first of their paintings I ever saw was this one:
To say the Brothers Hildebrandt were a big deal is thus something of an understatement. That's why I'm not at all surprised that, in 1982 and 1983, TSR released two Dungeons & Dragons calendars featuring paintings by Tim Hildebrandt (I wonder why Greg was not also involved in this project). Here's an ad for the 1984 calendar from Dragon:
Did anyone reading this own one of these calendars? Searches online reveal that the calendar's paintings, while indeed beautiful, are fairly generic in their subject matter. I don't see anything distinctly D&D-ish about this, for example:
Mind you, it's an open question as to what marks any artwork as "Dungeons & Dragons artwork" beyond the fact that it appeared in a D&D product, so perhaps I'm being unfair. More to the point, I imagine TSR didn't worry much about such questions. For them, the union of the D&D name and the artwork of one of the world's premier fantasy artists was likely sufficient justification for the existence of Realms of Wonder.
