Pauline Baynes

Pauline Diana Baynes (9 September 1922 – 1 August 2008) was an English illustrator, author, and commercial artist. She contributed drawings and paintings to more than 200 books, mostly in the children's genre. She was the first illustrator of some of J. R. R. Tolkien's minor works, including Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. She became well known for her cover illustrations for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and for her poster map with inset illustrations, A Map of Middle-earth. She illustrated all seven volumes of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, from the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Gaining a reputation as the "Narnia artist", she illustrated spinoffs like Brian Sibley's The Land of Narnia. In addition to work for other authors, including illustrating Roger Lancelyn Green's The Tales of Troy and Iona and Peter Opie's books of nursery rhymes, Baynes created some 600 illustrations for Grant Uden's A Dictionary of Chivalry, for which she won the Kate Greenaway Medal. Late in her life she began to write and illustrate her own books, with animal or Biblical themes.

Early life

Even in her old age, Baynes never forgot the sights and sounds of Mussoorie.

Baynes was born on 9 September 1922 at 67 Brunswick Place, Hove, East Sussex, England. Her father was Frederick William Wilberforce Baynes (1887–1967) and her mother was Jessie Harriet Maude Baynes, née Cunningham . Her only sibling was her elder sister, Angela Mary Baynes. Baynes was happy in her expatriate infancy. Baynes recalled crying herself to sleep on her journey home. an independent girls' boarding school in Camberley. At fifteen, she followed her sister to the Farnham School of Art (now subsumed into the University for the Creative Arts). She spent two terms studying design, which was to become the foundation of her mature technique.

War work and early career

In 1940, a year into World War II, both Baynes sisters joined the Women's Voluntary Service. – and by trying to secure work from a major London publisher. Five days later, Eames wrote to Baynes requesting specimen drawings for "an adult fairy story (complete with dragon and giant!)" that would require "some historical and topographical (Oxford and Wales) realism". Baynes reassured Eames that she knew Oxford from having sketched there, and knew Wales from having picked Welsh potatoes. Tolkien's publishers thought differently, preferring to have his books illustrated by Alan Lee, Francis Mosley, Ted Nasmith and Margrethe II of Denmark. Ultimately, Tolkien decided that Baynes was not the right artist to illustrate his major works, judging that they needed pictures "more noble or awe-inspiring" than she could produce.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil

Cover art for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

In 1961 Puffin used a painting by Baynes for the cover of a paperback edition of The Hobbit. Three years later, Allen & Unwin published The Lord of the Rings in a three-volume deluxe hardback edition for which they asked Baynes to design a slipcase. Never having read the story, Baynes was faced with the prospect of having to read a thousand pages of narrative before picking up a brush. Her sister, who knew the book well, rescued her from her predicament by painting a panorama of Tolkien's characters and locales that Baynes was able to borrow from. The triptych that Baynes created became one of the most widely reproduced of all her paintings, being recycled for the iconic cover art of a one-volume paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1968 and a three-volume Unwin Paperbacks version in 1981. Baynes also created an image of Aragorn's standard that was used to promote The Return of the King in a newspaper advertisement in October 1955. Ballantine's American edition of the book was issued with an alternative Baynes cover. Yet another cover appeared when the book was reissued in the United Kingdom in 1975 in a second edition that was uniform with The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Her illustrations were also used in an edition published in 2005 that was edited by Verlyn Flieger and included additional material written by scholars of Tolkien's work.

Maps of Middle-earth

In 1969, while waiting for Tolkien to finish The Silmarillion, Allen & Unwin commissioned Baynes to paint a map of his Middle-earth.

With the help of cartographers from the Bordon military camp in Hampshire, Baynes created A Map of Middle-earth that Allen & Unwin published as a poster in 1970. Both maps became famous.

Bilbo's Last Song

In 1974, a year after Tolkien's death, Allen & Unwin published his poem Bilbo's Last Song as Baynes's third and final Tolkien poster. Her painting showed a scene that Tolkien described in the closing pages of The Lord of the Rings: Sam, Merry and Pippin stand at the Grey Havens, watching an elvish ship carrying Frodo, Bilbo, Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf away from Middle-earth to the land of Aman. In 1990, the poem was reissued as a book with three parallel sequences of Baynes's paintings: one illustrating Bilbo's journey from Rivendell to the Undying Lands, one showing Bilbo in various states of repose, and one depicting the events narrated in The Hobbit. Some of the illustrations were omitted when the book was reissued by other publishers twelve years later.

Other works

In 1978 Baynes painted a cover for a paperback edition of Tolkien's translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo. In 1980 Allen & Unwin published Poems and Stories, a de luxe, boxed, single-volume anthology of several of Tolkien's shorter works. The book featured new illustrations by Baynes for the short story Leaf by Niggle, the verse drama The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Smith of Wootton Major. It also included all of Baynes's original illustrations for the latter three titles, some revised with grey and orange tinting. Baynes used the opportunity provided by revisiting Tom Bombadil to rework her illustration for The Hoard to make its dragon and knight look the way Tolkien had wanted them to. It was reissued with a modified version of this cover when it was published in a pocket-sized edition in 2014. Baynes's final Tolkien art was published in 2003, when an audiobook of Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle was issued with a CD insert showing an image of Niggle painting his Great Tree that had been commissioned from Baynes in the 1970s but had remained unpublished.

Illustrating C. S. Lewis

The Chronicles of Narnia

Lewis told his friend Dorothy L. Sayers that "The main trouble about Pauline B. is ... her total ignorance of animal anatomy. In the v. last book she has at last learned how to draw a horse. I have always had serious reservations about her ... But she had merits (her botanical forms are lovely), she needed the work (old mother to support, I think), and worst of all she is such a timid creature, so 'easily put down' that criticism cd. only be hinted ... At any real reprimand she'd have thrown up the job, not in a huff but in sheer, downright, unresenting, pusillanimous dejection. She is quite a good artist on a certain formal-fantastic level (did Tolkien's Farmer Giles far better than my books) but has no interest in matter – how boats are rowed, or bows shot with, or feet planted, or fists clenched. Arabesque [decoration] is really her vocation." Sayers in turn was scathing about Baynes's work.

Baynes on C. S. Lewis

Lewis made little impression on Baynes in their meetings. They corresponded little; she found him "kindly and tolerant", charming and polite. Much later, she learnt from a 1988 biography of Lewis that he had complained about her behind her back. "One doesn't need to have liked him to admire him", she told her confidante Charlotte Cory. "He never became a friend." She regretted that her Narnian art had overshadowed the rest of her work and 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 1994, James Riordan's A Book of Narnians provided a portrait gallery of Narnia's dramatis personae. Among others of Baynes's Lewisiana were Douglas Gresham's The Official Narnia Cookbook, The Magical Land of Narnia Puzzle Book, Sibley and Alison Sage's A Treasury of Narnians, The Narnia Trivia Book, The Wisdom of Narnia and Narnia Chronology.

The illustrations of which Baynes was most proud were the almost six hundred that she created for Grant Uden's A Dictionary of Chivalry, on which she laboured for nearly two years. They won her the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals' Kate Greenaway Medal for the best book illustrations of 1968.

Personal life

When Baynes's father retired he left India and returned to England, settling with Baynes's mother in a house close to Baynes's own near Farnham in southwest Surrey. Baynes was also close to Tolkien, whose Christianity she approved of as "more rooted and unobtrusive" than Lewis's. There is a second, small Baynes archive at the University of Oregon. Most of the art that she created for Tolkien's and Lewis's books has remained continuously in print ever since it was first published. As of 1998, the Narnia stories alone had sold more than one hundred million copies. Baynes's paintings of Narnia have gained still wider currency through their use in featurettes in-home media releases of Hollywood's Chronicles of Narnia movies. Looking back after half a century, Baynes's verdict on her momentous trip through the back of a wardrobe was down to earth. "I just thought of it as work." In their In Memoriam for Baynes in the Mythlore Inklings journal, Hammond and Scull stated that