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
Baynes was born on 9 September 1922 at 67 Brunswick Place, Hove, East Sussex, England.Eccleshare, Julia: Pauline Baynes; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2005 - 2008; Oxford University Press, 2008 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. While she was still a baby, her family went to India, where her father had been appointed District Officer in the British Imperial Indian Civil Service, serving as a First Class 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.
When she was five, her mother, who was in poor health, left Baynes's father, taking 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 rejoined his family for holidays in Switzerland.
Education
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 Beaufront School, an independent girls' boarding school in Camberley. Her favourite subject there was art, "because it was easy". By the time that she left, she had formed the ambition of becoming an illustrator. She liked Beaufront well enough to go back to it as a schoolmistress for two years in her mid-twenties.Lewis, C. S.:The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, ed. Walter Hooper; HarperCollins, 2004; pp. 1018 -1022 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 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 Oxford University. 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 certain that she had a vocation to follow in their footsteps. She was not a diligent student, spending time on "coffee and parties", and she left the Slade without a qualification. She did, however, achieve the distinction, one shared with her sister, of exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1939.
War work and early career
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. This experience 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.
Illustrating J. R. R. Tolkien
Farmer Giles of Ham
In 1948, after briefly 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 countriesBaynes, Pauline: Victoria and the Golden Bird; Blackie, 1948 – and by trying to secure work from a major London publisher. She sent Allen & Unwin a suite of comic reinterpretations of marginalia from the mediaeval Luttrell Psalter. J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Allen & Unwin's children's book The Hobbit, had recently offered the firm a mock-medieval comic novella called Farmer Giles of Ham. They had commissioned illustrations for the story from Milein Cosman, which Tolkien had disliked. On 5 August 1948, he complained to Ronald Eames, the publisher's art director, that they were "wholly out of keeping with the style or manner of the text".Scull, Christina and Hammond, Wayne G.: The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, 2nd edition; HarperCollins, 2017; Vol. 1, pp. 354-361 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".Scull, Christina and Hammond, Wayne G.: The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, 2nd edition; HarperCollins, 2017; Vol. 2, pp. 112-113 Baynes reassured Eames that she knew Oxford from having sketched there, and knew Wales from having picked Welsh potatoes. Visiting Allen & Unwin's offices to see what Baynes had produced for him, Tolkien was won over to her cause by the images. "They are more than illustrations", he wrote to Allen & Unwin on 16 March 1949, "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."
Tolkien was so pleased that on 20 December 1949, he wrote to her expressing the wish that she would one day illustrate two other books that he was working on – the tales that eventually became The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.McIlwaine, Catherine: Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth: Bodleian Library, 2018; p. 384 Tolkien's publishers thought differently, preferring to have his books illustrated by Alan Lee, Francis Mosley, Ted Nasmith and Margrethe II of Denmark.Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Lord of the Rings, ill. Ingahild Grathmer; Folio SocietyTolkien, J. R. R.: The Lord of the Rings, ill. Alan Lee; HarperCollinsTolkien, J. R. R.: The Silmarillion, ill. Ted Nasmith; HarperCollinsTolkien, J. R. R.: The Silmarillion, ill. Francis Mosley; Folio Society 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.Scull, Christina and Hammond, Wayne G.: The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, 2nd edition; HarperCollins, 2017; Vol. 2, p. 565
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
In 1961 Tolkien turned to Baynes again when he was compiling an anthology of some of his shorter pieces of verse. "You seem able to produce wonderful pictures with a touch of 'fantasy'", he wrote on 6 December, "but primarily bright and clear visions of things that one might actually see".Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien; Allen & Unwin, 1981; p. 312 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, featuring some of Baynes's most delicate and meticulous imagery, was published in 1962. Baynes told Tolkien that her favourite among the book's poems was The Hoard; only much later did she learn that her illustration for that particular poem had disappointed him – she had drawn a dragon facing away from the mouth of its cave and a knight without either a shield or a helmet, which he had thought looked implausible. He would also have preferred Tom Bombadil to have been shown on the front of the book rather than on the back, a wish which HarperCollins eventually granted when the book was reprinted in a pocket edition in 2014.Tolkien, J. R. R.:The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, pocket edition; HarperCollins, 2014
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.Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Hobbit; Puffin, 1961 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.Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Lord of the Rings, 3-volume de luxe hardcover edition; Allen & Unwin, 1964Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Lord of the Rings, 1-volume paperback edition; Allen & Unwin, 1968Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Lord of the Rings, 3-volume paperback edition; Unwin Paperbacks, 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.
Smith of Wootton Major
In 1967 Baynes illustrated the last piece of Tolkien's fiction to be published in his lifetime, his allegorical short story Smith of Wootton Major.Tolkien, J. R. R.: Smith of Wootton Major; Allen & Unwin, 1967 Ballantine's American edition of the book was issued with an alternative Baynes cover.Tolkien, J. R. R.: Smith of Wootton Major; Ballantine, 1969 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.Tolkien, J. R. R.: Smith of Wootton Major; Allen & Unwin, 1975 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