48 Facts About Pauline Baynes

Pauline Diana Baynes was an English illustrator, author, and commercial artist.

Pauline Baynes contributed drawings and paintings to more than 200 books, mostly in the children's genre.

Pauline Baynes was the first illustrator of some of JR R Tolkien's minor works, including Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

Pauline Baynes 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.

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

Pauline Baynes recalled crying herself to sleep on her journey home.

Pauline 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.

Pauline 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.

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

Pauline Baynes spent two terms studying design, which was to become the foundation of her mature technique.

Pauline Baynes was not a diligent student, spending time on "coffee and parties", and she left the Slade without a qualification.

Pauline Baynes did 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 Pauline Baynes sisters joined the Women's Voluntary Service.

From 1942 until the end of the war, the Pauline Baynes sisters worked in the Admiralty Hydrographic Department in Bath, making maps and marine charts for the Royal Navy.

Five days later, Eames wrote to Pauline Baynes requesting specimen drawings for "an adult fairy story " that would require "some historical and topographical realism".

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

Ultimately, Tolkien decided that Pauline 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.

Pauline Baynes would 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.

Never having read the story, Pauline Baynes was faced with the prospect of having to read a thousand pages of narrative before picking up a brush.

The triptych that Pauline 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.

Pauline Baynes created an image of Aragorn's standard that was used to promote The Return of the King in a newspaper advertisement in October 1955.

In 1967 Pauline Baynes illustrated the last piece of Tolkien's fiction to be published in his lifetime, his allegorical short story Smith of Wootton Major.

Pauline Baynes's illustrations were used in an edition published in 2005 that was edited by Verlyn Flieger and included additional material written by scholars of Tolkien's work.

Pauline Baynes's 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 1978 Pauline Baynes painted a cover for a paperback edition of Tolkien's translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo.

Pauline 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.

In 1999, half a century after her collaboration with Tolkien had begun, Pauline Baynes returned to Farmer Giles of Ham to add a map of the story's Little Kingdom.

The book was published with the revised cover that Pauline Baynes had painted for its second edition in 1976.

Pauline Baynes signed a contract with Lewis's publisher, Geoffrey Bles, in 1949, and delivered drawings, a coloured frontispiece and a cover design for the book the following year.

Pauline Baynes's drawings were "really excellent" with a "wealth of vigorous detail".

Pauline Baynes did "each book a little bit better than the last".

Pauline Baynes felt that the faces of her children were often "empty, expressionless and too alike", and that she couldn't draw lions.

Pauline Baynes noted that a knight was wearing his shield on his right arm instead of his left.

Pauline Baynes thought his stories "marvellous", but, even though she was a Christian, she was uncomfortable with their Christian subtext.

Pauline Baynes claimed not to have identified the lion Aslan with Christ until after she had finished work on The Last Battle, despite having drawn him standing upright like a man in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Pauline Baynes 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.

The illustrations of which Pauline 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.

In 1972, Pauline Baynes achieved a runner-up's commendation in the Greenaway competition with her illustrations for Helen Piers's Snail and Caterpillar.

Pauline Baynes contributed artwork to many magazines, including Holly Leaves, Lilliput, Puffin Post, The Sphere, The Tatler and The Illustrated London News; she had been introduced to The Illustrated London News by another of its artists, her friend and mentor Ernest Shepard.

The Church of the Good Shepherd in her home village of Dockenfield has a pair of Pauline Baynes's stained glass windows.

Pauline Baynes used her fallow periods to put together some books of her own.

Pauline Baynes looked after both her parents loyally, even when the burden of caring for them became so great that she could do her illustrating only in the small hours of the night.

In 1961, after many "interesting and highly enjoyable" but evanescent love affairs, Pauline Baynes answered a knock on her door from an itinerant dog's meat salesman.

Pauline Baynes was Friedrich Otto Gasch, usually known as Fritz.

Pauline Baynes was close to Tolkien, whose Christianity she approved of as "more rooted and unobtrusive" than Lewis's.

Pauline Baynes died in Dockenfield on 1 August 2008, leaving behind unpublished illustrations for The Quran, Aesop's Fables and Sibley's Osric the Extraordinary Owl: this last was printed thirteen years later.

Pauline Baynes bequeathed her archive of several hundred drawings and paintings, her library of more than two thousand books, and her intellectual property rights to the Oxford Programme of Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, with a request that her collection should be housed in the college's Chapin Library of Rare Books.

Pauline Baynes's standing in the pantheon of children's book illustrators is high, her drawings and paintings changing hands for thousands of pounds sterling.