Which Tolkien short story features a painter whose work reveals a vast world on a wall?

Leaf by Niggle features a painter whose work reveals a vast world on a wall.

Tolkien wrote the story during a period of personal and professional pressure, and it was first published in the Dublin Review in 1945. Niggle is a painter who becomes absorbed in creating a detailed tree, even though he struggles to complete the larger picture surrounding it.

The story follows Niggle through illness, death, and a strange afterlife-like landscape. There he discovers that the tree he painted has become real, along with parts of the wider country he could never finish on Earth.

The tale is often read as an allegory about artistic creation, duty, mortality, and the relationship between small acts and larger purposes. Tolkien resisted simple one-to-one interpretations, so the story should not be reduced to a single biographical key. Its title refers to Niggle’s attention to one leaf while imagining an entire tree.