Alan Lee (illustrator)

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Lee was born on the 20th of August 1947 in Middlesex, England, and he has spent a career turning the landscapes of the imagination into something you can almost smell and touch. His illustrations of J. R. R. Tolkien's world became so widely seen that they reshaped how millions of people picture Middle-earth. And then, with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, those images moved off the page and onto the screen.

  How does a single artist come to define the look of one of the most beloved fictional worlds ever created? What does it take to earn an Academy Award as an illustrator? And what was in the package that Jackson sent by courier to Lee's home in the south of England that convinced a reclusive artist to leave his quiet life and help build an entire world from scratch? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Roots and Influences

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  Lee studied at the Ealing School of Art, and the training he received there set the foundation for a style that would later be described by scholar Hans Velten as closely connected to the graphic approach of William Morris. Velten argues that Lee was comfortable with Tolkien's own admiration for Morris, and that this ease allowed Lee to lean into Morris's visual language when depicting Middle-earth.

  Watercolour painting and pencil sketches are among the media Lee commonly uses. That combination of delicacy and precision runs through his work on subjects far outside Tolkien's world. He illustrated Faeries in collaboration with Brian Froud in 1978, a book that was runner-up for the fantasy Locus Award for best art or illustrated book. The same collaboration was later the basis of a 1981 animated feature film of the same name.

  His non-Tolkien illustration work takes in Celtic myth, Greek epic, and medieval romance. He illustrated two versions of The Mabinogion, and provided cover paintings for the 1983 Penguin edition of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. His range signals that long before Tolkien made him famous, Lee was already one of the more versatile artists working in fantasy illustration.

• 3. A World of Awards

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  For illustrating Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson in 1988, Lee won the annual Chesley Award for Best Interior Illustration and was a highly commended runner-up for the Greenaway Medal. He also won the BSFA Award for Best Artwork that same year for the year's best single new image.

  Five years later, the Kate Greenaway Medal came to him from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. The winning book was Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff, a retelling of the Trojan War story published by Oxford in 1993.

  For the 60th anniversary edition of The Hobbit, Lee won his second Chesley Award for Interior Illustration. He was a finalist for that award eight times through 2011. At the 1998 World Fantasy Convention he won the annual World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Then in 2000, he won the competitive, juried Spectrum Award for fantastic art in the grandmaster category. In 2016 he received the Schwabischen Lindwurm of the Dragon Days Crossmedia Fantastikfestival Stuttgart. The Academy Award, however, came from an entirely different world.

• 4. The Courier Package

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  Peter Jackson wanted Alan Lee on his Lord of the Rings films, but Lee had a reputation for being reclusive. Jackson's solution was direct. He sent two of his previous films to Lee's home in the south of England by courier: Forgotten Silver and Heavenly Creatures. The package included a personal note from Jackson and from Fran Walsh.

  That note was enough. Lee became involved in the project, and he and John Howe were named the lead concept artists on the Lord of the Rings films, working between 2000 and 2003. Lee did not simply sketch and hand drawings over. He went on to help construct many of the scenarios for the movies, including objects and weapons for the actors.

  One example shows the depth of his involvement. His illustration of the tower of Orthanc was so closely followed by the set designers of The Two Towers that they used it to create what the production called a bigature at a 1:35 scale for close-up filming. Jackson later said of Lee's art: "His art captured what I hoped to capture with the films." Two years after the trilogy wrapped, Lee released a 192-page collection of his concept artwork, The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook, published by HarperCollins in 2005.

• 5. Cameos and Continuity

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  Lee made two cameo appearances in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the opening sequence of The Fellowship of the Ring he appears as one of the nine kings of men who became the Nazgul. In The Two Towers he appears as a Rohan soldier in the armoury, visible over the shoulder of Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn as the character speaks to Legolas in Elvish. His uncredited appearance in The Fellowship of the Ring places him specifically as the second person from the right, visible for a few seconds.

  When the Hobbit films came into development, Guillermo del Toro recruited Lee and John Howe for continuity of design in 2008. When Jackson later took over the Hobbit films project, they joined him. That continuity of vision across both trilogies meant Lee's influence on the collective look of Middle-earth spanned more than a decade of filmmaking.

  The Academy Award that Lee, Grant Major, and Dan Hennah earned in 2004 for Best Art Direction covered The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the third film in the trilogy. It was a formal acknowledgment that the visual world Lee had helped build reached the highest level of recognition in cinema.

• 6. Beyond the Books and Screen

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  Tolkien's published works represent only part of Lee's illustration career. He illustrated Black Ships Before Troy and The Wanderings of Odysseus, both by Rosemary Sutcliff and published in the 1990s. Adrian Mitchell's version of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shapeshifters, published by Frances Lincoln in 2009, also carries Lee's illustrations.

  Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss, The Mirrorstone by Michael Palin, The Moon's Revenge by Joan Aiken, and Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson all appear on his list. He also did the artwork for Alive!, a 2007 CD by the Dutch band Omnia, released during the Castlefest festival. Lee worked as a concept designer on the films Legend, Erik the Viking, and King Kong, as well as the television mini-series Merlin.

  In 2020, Lee gave a masterclass recorded at the Bibliotheque nationale de France during the exhibition Tolkien: voyage en Terre du Milieu. The Tolkien work continued well into the 2020s. He illustrated The Fall of Numenor in 2022, and the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings was also published that year with his illustrations.