Boris Vallejo – Tarzan and the Foreign Legion Ballantine Books Cover Original Art, 1976

Year: 1976

Artist: Boris Vallejo

Book: Tarzan and the Foreign Legion by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Medium: Oil on artist’s board

Image Size: 17.7 × 23.6 inches (45 × 60 cm)

Framed Size: 21.7 × 31.9 inches (55 × 81 cm)

Signed

An iconic original Boris Vallejo Tarzan painting, created for the hugely popular Ballantine Books paperback editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs' legendary adventure novels. Painted in 1976 for Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, the image captures Tarzan in a ferocious struggle with a huge orangutan, creating one of the most instantly memorable compositions from Vallejo's celebrated Tarzan series.

It is classic Vallejo at his best. Vallejo keeps the jungle background atmospheric and relatively subdued, forcing the confrontation forward and allowing his exceptional command of movement and dramatic lighting to dominate the painting.

The artwork belongs to one of the most recognizable paperback presentations of Tarzan ever published. During the mid-1970s Ballantine issued the complete sequence of 24 principal Tarzan novels with striking new covers by two giants of fantasy and comic art, Neal Adams and Boris Vallejo. The editions became known to collectors as the “Black Edition,” and remained in circulation for years; collector accounts repeatedly recall the Adams and Vallejo imagery as the reason they bought and discovered the books.

This piece has never come to auction until now. The popularity of Vallejo's paintings was such that Ballantine subsequently built its 1978 Tarzan Calendar around the complete group of twelve, with this Tarzan and the Foreign Legion image selected for November. The calendar itself became an important milestone in Vallejo's career: it was his first calendar and its success helped establish the format that became a major part of his international popularity.

For collectors of both Boris Vallejo and Edgar Rice Burroughs, this is therefore much more than an individual fantasy painting: it is one of the original images from the famous Vallejo/Adams Ballantine Tarzan series, a group of covers that helped define the visual identity of Tarzan for an entire generation of readers.

Artist: Boris Vallejo

Boris Vallejo (b. 1941) is one of the most internationally recognized fantasy and science-fiction painters of the modern era. Born in Lima, Peru, and later establishing his career in the United States, Vallejo rose to prominence during the 1970s with his highly polished oil paintings of warriors, heroic figures, monsters and fantastic worlds.

His enormous body of work includes celebrated interpretations of Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian and John Norman's Gor, alongside hundreds of fantasy and science-fiction book covers, calendars, advertising images and movie-related commissions.