The more I try to come up with artwork for these threads, the more I realize how hard it is to find some. I think the most important reason for this is that there was but very little D&D art available when I started playing the game and, if it was, much of it tended to be of questionable quality (imho, ymmv, ime, lamp, etc., etc., and so on). Therefore, we typically relied on our own imagination and such things as books and movies we'd read and seen up until then to breathe life into our characters - which I think is a good thing.
So I'm afraid I'm gonna have to go off-sync for this one as well, because there isn't really a picture as much as the pictures (yup) that made me love Thieves. Also, I'm gonna have to say that these pictures didn't really make me love Thieves as a class but rather inspired the personalities of two of my favorite Thief PCs.
It's a good thing we're allowed to use two pictures to demonstrate why we love a particular class, so I'll go with one of Errol Flynn for playing Robin Hood and other gallant, swashbuckling heroes, plus the sequence in the movie
The Four Musketeers (uncut version) where the musketeers gallantly proceed to take a bastion at La Rochelle the siege-laying troops of the king have been trying to capture for weeks - and then abandon it again - just to win a bet that they wouldn't succeed in having breakfast there.
Artist(s): Errol Flynn & Monica Evans
Source:
Robin Hood (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1937)
Class: Thief
View attachment 279356
Artist(s): Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Roy Kinnear
Source:
The Four Musketeers (Richard Lester, 1974)
Class: Thief
Breakfast 1/1 (YouTube)
Breakfast 1/2 (YouTube)
Apologies for the links, for they do not feature the scenes of the musketeers taking the bet and returning to the army camp.
Note: I played Thieves long before I'd heard of Cugel the Clever (of whom
I have not posted a pic in another of these threads). However, even after I had, I have never dared use him as an inspiration for my Thieves for fear of having my inadequacy taint what is one of my favorite fantasy characters of ever. Although I do confess that one of my Thieves did try his best to speak like him (and many other characters created by Jack Vance).