Pauline Diana Baynes (born September 9, 1922, in Hove, Sussex) was an English book illustrator, whose career spanned more than 60 years and whose work includes some of the best-known literature of the last century. Though her early years were spent in India, where her father was commissioner in Agra, she and her elder sister came to England for their schooling. Baynes attended the Slade School of Fine Art, but after a year she volunteered to work for the Ministry of Defence, painting camouflage, though she was soon transferred to a map-making department (knowledge of which she later employed to good effect when she drew maps of Narnia for C.S. Lewis and of Middle-earth for J.R.R. Tolkien).
Though she's best-known as the illustrator of the Chronicles of Narnia, Pauline Baynes was an extremely prolific artist, with over 100 titles to her name, along with book covers, frontispieces, magazine illustrations, advertising art and greeting cards.
Though she'd been illustrating books since 1940, it was in 1948 that she made her debut as illustrator AND writer of her first book, Victoria and the Golden Bird. That same year, Tolkien was shown her portfolio as he was complaining about another artist's rendition of his novella Farmer Giles of Ham. Tolkien loved her work and he said of her illustrations that they were "more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme". In time, the two became close friends, and she illustrated also Smith of Wooton Major, Adventures of Tom Bombadil, maps and slip case designs for Lord of the Rings. (She also painted the covers for the British 1973 one-volume and 1981 three-volume paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings, and produced illustrated versions of the maps from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.) Later, she worked on Leaf by Niggle and Bilbo's Last Song (as a poster in 1974, as a book in 1990), published after Tolkien's death.
Her association with Tolkien led to her work on Narnia and she illustrated each of the seven books published annually from 1950-1956. She returned to Narnia often, producing memorable cover designs for Puffin paperbacks, and new illustrations for The Land of Narnia and A Book of Narnians. In 1998, she colorized her drawings for HarperCollins, but it is interesting to contrast these with much of her other work. Baynes and Lewis had a cordial and professional relationship, but the two only ever met twice, and it is of note that while Lewis praised her to her face, he criticized her to others—famously, a hurtful comment that she couldn't draw lions.
Other noteworthy books are her work with Amabel Williams-Ellis, a pair of books including Arabian Nights (1957) and Fairy Tales of the British Isles (1960). She also illustrated A Treasury of French Tales by Henri Pourrat (published in 1953) and The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes, compiled by Iona and Peter Opie (1963).
Baynes was quite good at painting authentic medieval stories and did a beautiful little bestiary called Questionable Creatures, an adaptation of Spencer's Saint George and the Dragon, a book of Medieval Tales (translated and adapted by Jennifer Westwood) and A Companion to World Mythology by Richard Barber. However, her masterpiece in this realm is her almost 600 illustrations for Grant Uden's Dictionary of Chivalry, published in 1968 (she earned the Kate Greenaway medal for this one!). Similar to this (though not as beautiful) is an excellent little book called The Observer's Book of European Costume by Geoffrey Squire, published in 1975.
During her later years, she increasingly turned to religious-themed works. The three books Let There Be Light, I Believe (the Nicene Creed) and Song of the Three Holy Children are examples of this work, but there are several more. When she died, she left unfinished a book with decorations of passages from the Koran, and a very colorful Aesop's Fables. In 2023, the last book she had completed, Osric, the Extraordinary Owl, by Brian Sibley, was posthumously published in a limited print run.
Baynes passed away on August 1st, 2008, one of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century.
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