Although some of the rose-tinted spectacle comments are also correct. 1E and 2E had some brilliant novel and gaming product cover art, but interior art was black and white and often a bit ropey. The colour art in the 2E MONSTER MANUAL was pretty good, though. And the very surreal, art-nouveau and otherwise off-the-wall artwork for PLANESCAPE (which was inspired by the likes of Dave McKean's SANDMAN work) was brilliant throughout.

The height of D&D artwork quality was 3E. The artwork in the core rulebooks and a lot of the expansions was terrific, whilst the FORGOTTEN REALMS 3E core rulebook (one of the overall best roleplaying products ever released, design and art-wise) was fantastic. DRACONOMICON was also cool. Amongst RPG products, only Guardians of Order's GAME OF THRONES RPG comes close to matching to 3E's overall attractiveness, though the recent PATHFINDER core rulebook is also pretty good.

The stuff I've seen for 4E has been okay so far, but not really much more than 'meh'.