Great British Illustrators: 2) Pauline Baynes and The Chronicles of Narnia

 Yes, you might not have heard of Pauline Baynes, but she was the original illustrator of C.S. Lewis’ enchanting Narnia books. I was fortunate enough to attend a primary school in the early 1970s whose library hadn’t been updated much since the 1950s. I picked up the library’s copy of “Prince Caspian” because I liked the look of the front cover, and from then on I was hooked. Pauline Baynes came to the attention of C.S. Lewis through the recommendation of his good friend, and fellow Oxford don, J.R.R. Tolkien, (no mean illustrator himself) for whom Pauline Baynes had illustrated his highly enjoyable “Farmer Giles of Ham” tale.

I love the cleanness of her work, and her effortless ability to conjure up epic landscapes with a few strokes of the pen. As a kid, one of the first sketches I made that I was ever really proud of was a copy of a Pauline Baynes illustration of a little sad dragon from “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. This is a copy of an illustration from “The Magician’s Nephew”, not the first to be written, but the first part of the series in terms of the ongoing narrative. An utter joy.