Dungeons and Dragons Art Reveiw - The Thigh Master, Clyde Caldwell

 I've come this far and can ignore this painter no longer - Clyde Caldwell. If Larry Elmore is fundamentally a painter of landscapes and Keith Parkinson a painter of trees, then Clyde Caldwell is in pure essence a painter of womanly thighs. The teenage youth I was blessed him for that. 

Clyde Caldwell was one of the four great oil painters from TSR's Pit days, and my least favorite of the bunch as I poured over D&D art.  Caldwell did some sci-fi works for TSR's Gamma World, but is most known for his high or epic fantasy works featuring scantily clad women with exposed cleavage and thighs - really well done thighs. However, as a teenager who put a lot of time into Dungeons and Dragons, my chief love and concern was creating maps. And maps make me think Caldwell. Clyde Caldwell's best paintings for TSR are the covers he did for the D&D basic rules Gazetteers. As a collection of paintings for the same product and theme, I would say they are the best art work to ever come out of TSR. It's not just that they all include maps as part of the overall composition, it's the variety in each painting that evokes senses of place, culture, adventure, danger. It is the use of color across each painting, the harmony of disparate parts coming together. The brushwork and human anatomy are good, noticeably better than his earlier work. While figures are fairly static, there is still a dynamism in the flow from one image to the next. It's great stuff. And the women are all alluring.

Below are three of the Gazetteer covers I've taken directly from Caldwell's website. None of these are my favorites, but they give an idea of the collection as a whole. The first is for The Grand Duchy of Karameikos. This was the first in the gazetteer series that TSR published, so I assume it was also Caldwell's first painting in the series. Also here are the Orcs of Thar and The Minrothad Guilds. 

Good works, but not my favorites. Those come here, in the order of third, second and first faves. The images are smaller and are the actual gazetteer covers. We have the Five Shires, the Northern Reaches, and the Elves of Alfeim. Note that the last two feature thighs in classic Caldwell fashion. Note the colors.  I also love his more worldly take on halflings (hobbits) and his more aggressive take on elves. For the Northern reaches it's the colors, and the more historical Viking images juxtaposed with his awesome female warrior who appears in classic Caldwell fashion and adds the fantastic tone to the composition. 

Clyde Caldwell's The Elves of Alfheim 

Beyond the Gazetteers I'll add a few of my other Caldwell favorites, more typical of his style from early works right up to the present, although he did do covers for TSR's Ravenloft adventures that employed a similar compostion style to the gazatteers around the same time period. The major changes I see over time in Caldwell's work is moving towards harder, more defined lines and more detail. I don't think his compsotion and capture of the human form was ever any better than the several years he did the gazetteer covers in the later 1980s and early 1990s. 

One I especially enjoyed from my teenage years

One of Caldwell's famous and iconic Dagon Magazine covers

One of my favorite Dragonlance paintings by any artist

This is a personal favorite and guilty pleasure due to the female character with staff. It's by no measure Caldwell's best painting and is not well know. For me there is no way around it, the gal is just sexy as hell. This is the cover to the D&D adventure Earthshaker! I'll note that the lady has a strong resemblance to one of Larry Elmore's common female subjects and muses, who I understand is Mrs. Elmore, his wife. 

I'll add one of Elmore's examples as the final painting for comparison. I believe the title is Gold Mountains, which, besides the rocks painted gold, also points to the female figure's top. I love this painting so much that if i can ever find a decent copy of it I'll do a post dedicated to it alone.  Another interesting tidbit on Elmore is that he now paints figures from real models, whereas his earlier works, which included his wife, he painted more from his inner vision. It's no secret that his earlier works are better. Please don't take any of this as fact. These are items I vaguely recall from a TSR art book I had over thirty years ago, and in more recent years Scott Taylor's blog, Art of the Genre. 

https://artofthegenre.com/blogs/news/when-larry-elmore-had-a-girl

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