In memoriam: Pauline Baynes.(Obituary)

PAULINE BAYNES, WHO DIED ON AUGUST 1, 2008 at the age of eighty-five, was one of the most talented artists of the twentieth century. She was also shy and reserved, allowing the quality of her work to speak for itself, and as a result hers was never a household name. But by her hand, the invented worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis first came visually to life. Some readers, indeed, have said that for them, her pictures were Middle-earth, they were the land of Narnia.

Tolkien himself said that her art for Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), drawn in a medieval style which became one of her specialties, "reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings." With that, she became his illustrator of choice, providing art also for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962) and Smith of Wootton Major (1967), the wraparound cover for the Puffin Books Hobbit (1961), a triptych view of Middle-earth for the slipcase of a deluxe Lord of the Rings (1964), and two famous posters, A Map of Middle-earth and There and Back Again (1970, 1971, the latter based on The Hobbit). Pauline and her husband Fritz Gasch became good friends of Tolkien and his wife, and saw them socially from time to time. She remained a popular Tolkien artist long after the author's death, with both poster and book versions of his Bilbo's Last Song (1974, 1990), more cover art for Tolkien's works, and new pictures added to earlier art in the Tolkien collection Poems and Stories (1980).

Through Tolkien, her art became known to C.S. Lewis, and she was engaged to illustrate his seven chronicles of Narnia, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950. Like Tolkien, Lewis found that his artistic collaborator added more than mere pictures to his texts. Although he was privately critical of some aspects of her work, such as her depiction of lions, he admitted that the popularity of the Narnia stories was due in no small part to their illustrations. When the final book of the series, The Last Battle (1956), won the Carnegie Medal for excellence in children's literature and Lewis received congratulations from his illustrator, he replied: "Is it not rather 'our' Medal?" Throughout her career, Pauline Baynes was best known as the "Narnia artist"; and while she was sorry that this overshadowed her many other accomplishments, she continued her association with the Narnia books for more than half a century, producing (among much else) color wraparound covers for the Puffin paperbacks (1959-65), the poster Map of Narnia and the Surrounding Countries ...