Rightly or wrongly, I have long thought of Muth’s style at the beginning his career, when he drew the above stories, as “School of Jeffrey Jones.” There are, however, definite similarities between Muth’s painting style and palette and Alan Lee’s watercolour illustrations of the late 1970s* and beyond; so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if Lee’s work was also, as much as Jeffrey Jones’s, an influence on the “look” of “Small Gifts” and, especially, “Pursuit.”

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* The first edition of Faeries by Lee, Froud, et al., appeared in 1978.