Sergey Yukhimov

I know some of us here have and love the 1993 2-volume hardback russian lord of the rings, illustrated by Sergey Yukhimov. I recently purchased some 72 photos of Yukhimovs tolkien illustrations from Jan Boom and was surprised by the fact that all but 2 of them are different illustrations from the 32-33 published in the illustrated LotR. I have seen a few of them on various russian artsites that I no longer dare to frequent, but many were new to me and to my surprise 16 of them were silmarillion related. There were also illustrations for the Hobbit and many illustrations for the lord of the rings that were not used in the illustrated edition. This begs a couple of questions: 1)were illustrated editions planned for the silmarillion and the hobbit that never happened? 2) how many middle-earth illustrations did Yukhimov make in total? Including the ones in the published LotR i have 102 unique illustrations, but there must be more because it's easy to tell that I am missing illustrations from parts of the books where there are gaps in the storylines I can put together from the photos.

For those who dont know Yukhimov: I'm by no means an expert, but he is one of my absolute favourite Tolkien illustrators. He was Ukrainian (from Odessa i believe) and his influence is there to see in the artwork of some of our western Tolkien illustrators. It's difficult to describe his style, because he is a bit all over the place, but there is certainly a tradition here of classical illustrations for slavic folktales. There are iconic influences from orthodoxy, there are several in the style of medieval illuminated manuscrips, there are some that border on surrealism. Some are beautiful, some are silly, some are disturbing and some are mysterious. There is a great variation in his artwork.

Here are some of the illustrations from the published 2-volume Lord of the Rings:











Here are some of the photos i purchased from Jan.
The silmarillion:
I was particularly struck by a depiction of not only Melkor and Ungoliant killing the trees, but also a rare choice of motive - Melkor destroying the Lamps.







The Hobbit:



The Lord of the Rings:









Jan acquired the photos in 1993, or thereabouts, along with the 2-volume LotR, but he had no recollection of their origin. I am at any rate happy to have them just to look at them.