Pauline Baynes

Her father was Frederick William Wilberforce Baynes (1887–1967) and her mother was Jessie Harriet Maude Baynes, née Cunningham (c. 1888–1958).

Her only sibling was her elder sister, Angela Mary Baynes.

While she was still a baby, her family emigrated to India, where her father had been appointed a Commissioner (district official) in the British imperial Indian Civil Service, serving as a senior magistrate.

The Bayneses divided their time between the city of Agra and a refuge from the midsummer heat in the hill town of Mussoorie.

Baynes was happy in her expatriate infancy, loving her ayah (native nursemaid) and a pet monkey that had been trained to take tiffin at the tea table.

When she was five, her mother, who was in poor health, took both her daughters back to England.

Baynes recalled crying herself to sleep on her journey home.

The three returnees lived a nomadic life in Surrey, lodging with various friends and renting a series of rooms in boarding houses.

Baynes's father stayed behind in India, licensed by his wife to feel "free to do as he pleased", but regularly rejoining his family for holidays in Switzerland.

Baynes began her education at a convent school, where the nuns who taught her mocked her fantastical imagination, her homemade clothes and her ability to speak Hindi.

Her unhappiness over their bullying was slightly mitigated when she learned that Rudyard Kipling, whom she admired, had experienced something similar.

When she was nine, she was sent to Beaufort School, an independent girls' boarding establishment, no longer extant, in Camberley.

Her favourite subject there was art, "because it was easy".

By the time that she left, she had already formed the ambition of becoming an illustrator.

She liked Beaufort well enough to go back to it as a teacher for two years in her mid-twenties.

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.

At nineteen, again like her sister, she won a place at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, just as it left its usual premises on the Gower Street campus of University College London to begin a period of wartime cohabitation with the Ruskin School of Drawing in the University of Oxford.

Studying the work of the illustrators Gustave Doré, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Ernest Shepard, R. S. Sherriffs, Rex Whistler, Jacques-Marie-Gaston Onfroy de Bréville ("Job") and the anonymous illuminators of mediaeval manuscripts, she became more convinced then ever that she had a vocation to follow in their footsteps.

She was not a diligent student, frittering away her time on "coffee and parties", and she left the Slade without a qualification.

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 and of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

Baynes was born on 9 September 1922 at 67 Brunswick Place, Hove, East Sussex, England.

She did, however, achieve the distinction, one shared with her sister, of exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1939.

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 that the Royal Engineers had set up in Farnham Castle, where the sisters were put to work making models to be used as teaching aids.

One of their colleagues at the centre was Powell Perry, whose family owned a company that published picture books for children.

It was Perry who 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 Baynes sisters worked in the Admiralty Hydrographic Department in Bath, making maps and marine charts for the Royal Navy (an experience that stood Baynes in good stead in later life when she created maps of C. S. Lewis's Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth).

A letter that she wrote to a friend at this time included a sketch that he passed on to Frank Whittaker, an employee of Country Life.

Her friend's kindness resulted in commissions from the magazine to illustrate three books of fairy stories by Victoria Stevenson.

In 1948, after her brief interval of teaching at Beaufort, Baynes sought to develop her career by writing a book of her own – Victoria and the Golden Bird, a fantasy about a girl's magical visits to far-off countries – and by trying to secure work from a major London publisher.

She sent George, Allen & Unwin a suite of comic reinterpretations of marginalia from the mediaeval Luttrell Psalter.

It so happened that Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Allen & Unwin's children's book The Hobbit, had recently offered the firm a mock-mediaeval comic novella called Farmer Giles of Ham.

Allen & Unwin had commissioned illustrations for the story from Milein Cosman, but Tolkien had disliked them.

On 5 August 1948, he complained to Ronald Eames, Allen & Unwin's art director, that they were "wholly out of keeping with the style or manner of the text".

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".

She reassured Eames that she knew Oxford from having sketched there, and knew Wales from having picked Welsh potatoes.