Pauline Baynes

• 1. Introduction

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  Pauline Baynes was born on the 9th of September 1922 at 67 Brunswick Place in Hove, East Sussex, and she would go on to draw the invented worlds that millions of readers first saw in their minds. Her name may not be famous, but her pictures almost certainly are. If you have ever held a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or traced your finger across a poster map of Middle-earth, you have already seen her work.

  Over the course of her career she contributed drawings and paintings to more than 200 books. She illustrated all seven volumes of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. She created the iconic cover art for The Lord of the Rings. She won the Kate Greenaway Medal, the highest honour in British children's book illustration. And she did it all while charging Lewis's publisher just £100 per book, a flat fee that would make her, in retrospect, one of the great bargains in publishing history.

  The questions worth sitting with are not only what she made, but how she came to make it. What drew two of the twentieth century's most celebrated fantasy writers to the same illustrator? What did they think of her, privately? And what did she think of the worlds she spent a lifetime drawing?

• 2. From Hove to Hove-Not

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  Pauline's father, Frederick William Wilberforce Baynes, had been appointed a Commissioner in the British imperial Indian Civil Service, and while she was still a baby the family emigrated to India. The Baynes household divided its time between Agra and the hill town of Mussoorie, a retreat from the midsummer heat. By her own account, Baynes was happy in her expatriate infancy.

  When she was five, her mother, who was in poor health, took Pauline and her elder sister Angela back to England. Baynes later recalled crying herself to sleep on that journey home. Back in Surrey, the three of them led a nomadic life, lodging with friends and renting rooms in boarding houses. Her father stayed behind in India, his wife having licensed him to feel free to do as he pleased, though he rejoined the family for holidays in Switzerland.

  School brought its own difficulties. At the convent where she began her education, the nuns mocked her fantastical imagination, her homemade clothes, and her ability to speak Hindi. She found slight comfort in learning that Rudyard Kipling, whom she admired, had experienced something similar. At nine she was sent to Beaufort School, an independent girls' boarding school in Camberley, where her favourite subject was art, in her own words, "because it was easy." She would eventually return to Beaufort as a teacher for two years in her mid-twenties.

  At fifteen she followed her sister to the Farnham School of Art, spending two terms studying design, a discipline that became the foundation of her mature technique. At nineteen she won a place at the Slade School of Fine Art, just as it had decamped from its Gower Street campus to share wartime quarters with the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford. She studied the illustrators Gustave Dore, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, and Ernest Shepard, along with the anonymous illuminators of mediaeval manuscripts, and became certain she had found her vocation. She was not, however, a diligent student, spending time on what she later called "coffee and parties." She left the Slade without a qualification, though not before exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1939, an honour she shared with her sister.

• 3. War, Maps, and a First Break

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  In 1940, a year into World War II, both Baynes sisters joined the Women's Voluntary Service. The WVS sent them to the Camouflage Development Training Centre at Farnham Castle, where they made models used as teaching aids. One of their colleagues there was Powell Perry, whose family owned a company that published picture books for children. Perry gave Baynes her first professional commissions. Among the Perry Colour Books to which she contributed were Question Mark, Wild Flower Rhymes, and a novelization of the libretto of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute.

  From 1942 until the end of the war, the sisters moved to the Admiralty Hydrographic Department in Bath, making maps and marine charts for the Royal Navy. It was unglamorous work, but it trained Baynes in the discipline of cartography. That training paid off handsomely when she later created the maps of Narnia and Middle-earth that became as famous as the books themselves.

  A letter she wrote to a friend during this period contained a sketch that her friend passed on to Frank Whittaker, an employee of Country Life magazine. The chain of kindness that followed led to commissions from the magazine to illustrate three books of fairy stories by Victoria Stevenson. The door into professional illustration had opened through a scrap of paper, a friend's good judgment, and a name passed along at the right moment.

• 4. Tolkien's Unexpected Ally

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  In 1948 Baynes sent the publisher Allen and Unwin a suite of comic reinterpretations of marginalia from the mediaeval Luttrell Psalter. The timing was fortunate. J. R. R. Tolkien had recently offered the firm a mock-medieval comic novella called Farmer Giles of Ham, for which illustrations by Milein Cosman had already been commissioned, and which Tolkien hated. On the 5th of August 1948 he complained to the publisher's art director Ronald Eames that the existing illustrations were, in his view, "wholly out of keeping with the style or manner of the text."

  Five days later, Eames wrote to Baynes requesting specimen drawings for what he described as "an adult fairy story (complete with dragon and giant!)" requiring "some historical and topographical (Oxford and Wales) realism." Baynes reassured him that she knew Oxford from having sketched there, and Wales from having picked Welsh potatoes. When Tolkien visited Allen and Unwin's offices and saw what she had produced, he was won over entirely. "They are more than illustrations", he wrote to the publisher on the 16th of March 1949. "They are a collateral theme. I showed them to my friends whose polite comment was that they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings."

  So pleased was Tolkien that on the 20th of December 1949 he wrote to Baynes directly, expressing the wish that she would one day illustrate two other books he was working on, the tales that eventually became The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. His publishers, preferring artists such as Alan Lee, Francis Mosley, Ted Nasmith, and Margrethe II of Denmark, had other ideas. Tolkien himself ultimately decided that his major works needed pictures "more noble or awe-inspiring" than Baynes could produce. But in 1961 he turned to her again when compiling The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, telling her she seemed able to produce "wonderful pictures with a touch of 'fantasy', but primarily bright and clear visions of things that one might actually see." The book was published in 1962 and contains some of her most delicate and meticulous imagery.

  The partnership's greatest commercial legacy came not through the interiors but through covers and maps. In 1961 Puffin used a Baynes painting for the cover of a paperback edition of The Hobbit. Three years later, Allen and Unwin asked her to design a slipcase for a three-volume deluxe hardback edition of The Lord of the Rings. Never having read the book, Baynes faced the prospect of working through a thousand pages before picking up a brush. Her sister, who knew the story well, rescued her by painting a panorama of Tolkien's characters and locales that Baynes could borrow from. The triptych she created from that starting point was recycled for the cover of a one-volume paperback in 1968 and a three-volume Unwin Paperbacks version in 1981, becoming one of the most widely reproduced of all her paintings.

• 5. The Narnia Artist

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  C. S. Lewis chose Baynes to illustrate his Narnia books after enjoying her work on Farmer Giles of Ham, encouraged also by a bookshop assistant. He met her only three times: at his publisher's office, at a lunch party at Magdalen College in 1949, and at the Charing Cross Hotel in London in 1951. He found her "good and beautiful and sensitive."

  Baynes signed a contract with Lewis's publisher, Geoffrey Bles, in 1949 and delivered drawings, a coloured frontispiece, and a cover design the following year. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950. At Lewis's request, Baynes went on to illustrate all six sequels: Prince Caspian in 1951, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 1952, The Silver Chair in 1953, The Horse and His Boy in 1954, The Magician's Nephew in 1955, and The Last Battle in 1956. Lewis commented that her work had done much to make the Narnia books popular.

  Too unworldly to negotiate a royalties deal, Baynes sold her illustrations to Lewis's publishers for a flat fee of just £100 per book. As of 1998, the Narnia stories alone had sold more than one hundred million copies. She was ruefully aware that a book collector would pay more for a first edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe than she had been paid for illustrating it.

  In his letters Lewis praised her effusively while also being frank about her limitations. Her drawings had "a wealth of vigorous detail" and she did "each book a little bit better than the last." But he felt the faces of her children were "empty, expressionless and too alike," and he observed in Latin that she limped in her drawing of quadrupeds. He told Dorothy L. Sayers that her "total ignorance of animal anatomy" was a persistent problem, though he acknowledged that "arabesque" decoration was really her vocation, and that her botanical forms were "lovely." He was reluctant to press his criticisms too hard because, as he told Sayers, she was such a timid creature that at any real reprimand she would have thrown up the job "not in a huff but in sheer, downright, unresenting, pusillanimous dejection."

  Baynes, for her part, found Lewis kindly and polite but never a friend. Much later she learned from a 1988 biography that he had complained about her in private. "One doesn't need to have liked him to admire him", she told her confidante Charlotte Cory. She also revealed that, despite being a Christian herself, she had not identified the lion Aslan with Christ until after she had finished work on The Last Battle, even though she had drawn him standing upright like a man in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

• 6. Chivalry, Medals, and a Wider Career

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  The illustrations of which Baynes was most proud were the almost six hundred she created for Grant Uden's A Dictionary of Chivalry, a project on which she laboured for nearly two years. They won her the Kate Greenaway Medal for the best book illustrations of 1968. In 1972 she received a runner-up's commendation in the same competition for her illustrations for Helen Piers's Snail and Caterpillar.

  Her bibliography stretched well beyond Lewis and Tolkien. She illustrated works by Richard Adams, Hans Christian Andersen, Enid Blyton, Rumer Godden, Roger Lancelyn Green, Rudyard Kipling, George MacDonald, Mary Norton, Iona and Peter Opie, Beatrix Potter, and Arthur Ransome, among many others. Several commissions came through her bond with Puffin Books' Kaye Webb. Baynes also contributed artwork to magazines including Lilliput, The Sphere, The Tatler, and The Illustrated London News, having been introduced to the last of these by her friend and mentor Ernest Shepard.

  Commercial clients found her too. Stationery companies commissioned Christmas cards from her, some of which were still being reproduced decades after she painted them. Huntley and Palmers employed her to advertise their biscuits. For the Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, she designed what the source describes as the world's largest pieces of crewel embroidery. The Church of the Good Shepherd in her home village of Dockenfield has a pair of her stained glass windows.

• 7. A Life Between Drawings

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  In 1961, after many love affairs she described as "interesting and highly enjoyable" but evanescent, Baynes answered a knock at her door from an itinerant dog's meat salesman. He was Friedrich Otto Gasch, known as Fritz, born on the 21st of September 1919 in Auerswalde, Saxony. He had served in Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, been taken prisoner, and eventually decided to make England his home. A whirlwind courtship led to their marriage on the 18th of March 1961. "Meeting Fritz", Baynes said, "was the best thing that ever happened to me; he was a splendid man and a wonderful husband who was completely tolerant of his wife's obsession to draw." Their only child, a son, was stillborn. Gasch died on the 28th of October 1988 at the age of sixty-nine.

  Two years after Gasch died, Baynes was contacted by Karin Gasch, born in 1942, a daughter of Fritz's by an earlier marriage. Baynes took on the role of a Gasch family member. "It was", she said, "like something magical coming back at me through a wardrobe."

  Through all of this she continued to care for both her parents after they returned from India, at times doing her illustrating only in the small hours of the night because the burden of care left no other free hours. Her father's mistress, with whom he had established a relationship in India, followed him to Surrey and set up home nearby. Long estranged from his wife, Frederick Baynes maintained only a pretence of marriage. Pauline looked after both parents loyally regardless.

  In her later years commissions could be hard to come by, and she turned her fallow periods toward writing and illustrating her own books. Several drew on her delight in animals, including How Dog Began, dedicated to eleven of her own pets. Most were rooted in religion: Good King Wenceslas, The Song of the Three Holy Children, Noah and the Ark, In the Beginning, Thanks Be to God, and I Believe, which illustrated the Nicene Creed. One volume, Questionable Creatures, only found an American publisher after Baynes agreed to paint out a mermaid's breasts.

• 8. Legacy and Archive

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  Baynes died in Dockenfield on the 1st of August 2008, leaving behind unpublished illustrations for the Quran, Aesop's Fables, and Brian Sibley's Osric the Extraordinary Owl. The last of these was printed thirteen years after her death.

  She bequeathed her archive of several hundred drawings and paintings, a library of more than two thousand books, and her intellectual property rights to the Oxford Programme of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with a request that the collection be housed in the college's Chapin Library of Rare Books. A second, smaller archive went to the University of Oregon.

  Sibley, writing in The Independent, described the hallmarks of her work as "a talent for lively, imaginative designs; the ability to create a sense of energy and animation; a confident fluidity of line; a bold use of vibrant, gem-like colours and the subtle employment of negative space." Hammond and Scull, writing in the Mythlore Inklings journal, stated that by her hand, the invented worlds of Tolkien and Lewis first came visually to life, and that some readers had said her pictures were Middle-earth, they were the land of Narnia.

  Her working Fellowship of the Ring map, scribbled over with new place names in Tolkien's hand along with barely legible notes on latitudes, ships, trees, horses, elephants, and camels, was bought by Oxford's Bodleian Library in 2016 for roughly £60,000. It is a document that belongs equally to both of them, and it suggests something true about the nature of their collaboration: Baynes provided the images, Tolkien filled them with his world, and the two together produced something that neither could have made alone.