The Ascent of Orodruin, a missing Cor Blok painting, resurfaces (23.10.13 by Pieter Collier) - Comments

In recent years, the artist Cor Blok has become better known to Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings fans. HarperCollins took the unusual step of publishing two calendars in a row, 2011 and 2012, featuring his work. 

The release of A Tolkien Tapestry in 2011 gave us a nearly complete look at Blok's paintings. However some the paintings were sold in the 90's without any images of them being kept, and hence they don't feature in A Tolkien Tapestry. And since we were trying to locate some of the missing images we wrote several appeals that were published on numerous Tolkien and fantasy related websites. Nothing really happened, until now.

I'm extremely proud to show you The Ascent of Orodruin, one of the missing pieces of Cor Blok. We had it on file as Orodruin, but had no idea what it looked like. Of course when the owner contacted us, after having read the book, Cor Blok did recognize the piece right away...

The work was created on 27 december 1959, and purchased probably around 1994 and still remains in the collection of the buyer. We are so happy to be able to show this work... it is just stunning! We are glad it has been treasured and still looks fantastic.

So the search continues. After this, we start to believe again more missing pictures might resurface!

Here's a list of the paintings, with the page numbers from A Tolkien Tapestry for the ones that appear in the book. Roman numerals refer to paintings of which more than one version was created. The titles in bold type are ones Blok is particularly interested in tracing:

"The Game of Riddles" (p. 59)
"Gandalf persuades Bilbo to leave the Ring to Frodo" (p. 53)
"Weathertop" (p. 76)
"The Balrog II" (p. 92)
"Frodo's Vision on Amon Hen" (pp. 100-101)
"Isengard" (p. 115)
"Gollum's Promise" (p. 121)
"The Forbidden Pool" (p. 128)
"The Cross-roads" (p. 129)
"Sam Attacks Shelob" (p. 132)
"The Stone of Erech" (p. 135)
"The Dead Marshes I"

Of the last one we don't know how it looks like, since no images were kept. At least we can now show you how Ascent of Orodruin looked like!

And yes, we still have reproductions and original art by Cor Blok available.

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