English illustrator Pauline Baynes died 1 August 2008. Born 9 September 1922 in Brighton, her best known work includes C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and many of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works.
Baynes spent the early years of her life in India, where her father was a civil servant. Upon her return to England, she studied at the Farnham School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London, but never received a degree. During World War II, she was a model-maker for the Royal Engineers’ camouflage unit (1940-42) and a map maker for the Admiralty’s hydrographics department (1942-45). Her first professional commissions also came in the early 1940s, and then she met Tolkien in 1948. At the time, he had published only one book, The Hobbit, though he’d already written Farmer Giles of Ham, which would appear in 1949. Tolkien thought Baynes’ medieval style ideally suited for the new book, and she produced both pen-and-ink and three color illustrations for the book. Baynes’ work later graced the cover of the 1961 Puffin edition of The Hobbit.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden quotes a letter from Tolkien to publisher Allen & Uniwn dated 16 March 1949: “Miss Baynes’ pictures must have reached Merton on Saturday; but owing to various things I did not see them till yesterday. I merely write to say that I am pleased with them beyond even the expectations aroused by the first examples. They are more than illustrations, 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.”
Baynes married former German prisoner of war Fritz Otto Gasch in 1961; he died in 1988.
The Guardian has a nice obituary here. A collection of some of her Tolkien covers are visible on this page.