Pauline Baynes drew the worlds other writers invented. Her pen drawings set the look of Narnia for generations of readers, and her poster maps turned Tolkien’s Middle-earth into something you could pin on a wall. What ties the work together is a designer’s habit of mind: she borrowed the page structure of medieval manuscripts, drew with a clean, even line that survived cheap printing, and treated a map as a picture full of small stories.
Her books and maps are in copyright, and no Pauline Baynes work appears in the open-access collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art. This guide therefore describes her work in text only and does not suggest it is free to use. For images cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Pauline Baynes?
Pauline Diana Baynes was born in Sussex on 9 September 1922, according to Bridgeman Images’ artist biography and her press obituaries. Bridgeman and Encyclopedia.com both record that she spent her early childhood in India, where her father worked in the Indian Civil Service, before returning to England for school.
Bridgeman’s biography says she studied design at the Farnham School of Art and then followed her sister to the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1940 the two sisters were sent to the Royal Engineers’ camouflage training centre at Farnham Castle, and she later drew maps and charts for the Admiralty, as Bridgeman, the Archives West finding aid for her papers and Waterstones’ author profile all note. That wartime map work is worth remembering: precise cartographic drawing would become one of her signatures.
She died in August 2008, aged 85, as tributes on NarniaWeb and TheOneRing.net reported at the time.
Tolkien, Lewis and the key Pauline Baynes books
Her break came through a medieval joke. Books for Keeps and The Christian Century both tell how Tolkien, unhappy with artwork his publisher had commissioned for Farmer Giles of Ham, saw her witty reworkings of the marginal drawings in the Luttrell Psalter, a fourteenth-century English manuscript. She got the job, and Farmer Giles of Ham was published with her drawings in 1949.
Narnia followed. Books for Keeps traces her introduction to C. S. Lewis through Tolkien and dates their first meeting to a lunch Lewis gave at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 31 December 1949; NarniaWeb cites a different account by Lewis, in which a bookshop recommended her as an artist who drew animals and children well. Either way, she illustrated all seven Chronicles of Narnia, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950 to The Last Battle in 1956.
Her Tolkien work continued with The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). In 1969 she drew A Map of Middle-earth, published as a poster by George Allen & Unwin in 1970, and a companion Hobbit map, There and Back Again, followed in 1971. A working copy of the Middle-earth map, annotated by Tolkien for her, was later found among her books and acquired by the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, as the Smithsonian Magazine and the Irish Times reported. Her illustrations for Tolkien’s poem Bilbo’s Last Song first appeared as a poster in 1974 and as a picture book in 1990.
The book that won her the Kate Greenaway Medal, the British award for children’s book illustration, was not fiction at all. She received the 1968 medal for A Dictionary of Chivalry, edited by Grant Uden. The Christian Century describes close to 600 illustrations running through its margins, a project of about two years.
For Lewis’s centenary in 1998, she hand-coloured her original black-and-white Narnia drawings for new full-colour editions, as Books for Keeps and NarniaWeb both record.
What to look at in a Pauline Baynes drawing
An even, confident line. Books for Keeps notes that she worked in pen and ink for Narnia. Look at how little the line swells or thins: contours are drawn with a steady weight, and texture comes from short parallel strokes and stippled patches rather than heavy shading. That economy is why the drawings stay crisp when printed small on rough paper.
Figures as silhouettes. Her children, fauns and beasts read first as clear shapes against open paper. Poses are often slightly stylised, like figures in a manuscript, so gesture carries the action even at thumbnail size.
The page edge as a frame. Many drawings are vignettes, fading out at the edges or wrapping around the type, rather than hard-edged rectangles. In A Dictionary of Chivalry the pictures live in the margins, so text and image are planned together as one page.
Medieval borrowing, not imitation. The Luttrell Psalter story matters because it shows her method. She took the structure of illuminated pages, with borders, tiny figures in the margins and decorated corners, and used it in a light, modern hand. Compare the historic sources in our guide to illuminated manuscripts and the museum’s illuminated manuscripts theme.
Lettering inside the picture. On her poster maps, place names are hand-lettered and set into the landscape, curving along rivers and spaced across regions, so the words become part of the drawing rather than labels laid on top.
Technique: the illustrated map as a layout
The poster maps are where her design thinking is easiest to see. A Map of Middle-earth does more than show geography: it frames the map with small vignettes of characters and scenes from the story, so the sheet works as an index of places and a picture-strip of events at once. The annotated working copy at the Bodleian shows how closely she checked names and positions with Tolkien, which is the same discipline a designer brings to an information graphic.
She treated Narnia the same way. Magdalen College’s C. S. Lewis: Words and Worlds site describes her map of Narnia and the surrounding countries, produced as a separate poster for Puffin Books in 1972, after earlier maps for the books’ endpapers. Endpapers, posters and in-text vignettes were all part of one visual system that told readers where they were.
Colour came later in her Narnia work. The original drawings were black and white, and the 1998 centenary editions added her own hand-colouring. Seeing both versions side by side is a useful lesson in how a strong line drawing survives the addition of colour: the structure is already complete, and colour only adds atmosphere.
For historic maps that use the same mix of decoration and information, browse our guide to old maps. For another English illustrator whose line drawings defined a classic children’s world, compare E. H. Shepard, and for a darker, more textural approach to fantasy book illustration, see Mervyn Peake.
How designers can borrow Pauline Baynes’s ideas
- Draw for the smallest reproduction. Test illustrations and icons at their smallest size. A steady line weight and clear silhouettes, as in her Narnia drawings, keep images legible on screens and in print.
- Plan text and image together. Instead of placing a picture in a box, let illustration run into the margin or wrap around a column of type, as her pages for A Dictionary of Chivalry do. Editorial layouts and long-form web pages can use the same idea with marginal spot illustrations.
- Use borders as navigation. Decorated borders and corner vignettes can signal chapter, section or theme. In a product or campaign system, a consistent border family does the same job as running heads.
- Make maps that tell stories. For event maps, campus maps or game worlds, add small scenes around the edge that show what happens where, the way her Middle-earth poster does. Keep the map itself clean so the vignettes have room.
- Letter into the landscape. Set place names along curves and spread them across areas instead of stacking labels. Hand-lettering, or careful type on a path, makes words part of the picture.
- Finish the drawing before adding colour. Build the image in line first and make sure it works in black and white. Then add a restrained palette; test combinations with the colour palette generator.
Frequently asked questions
What is Pauline Baynes known for?
She drew the original illustrations for C. S. Lewis’s seven Narnia books (1950–56), illustrated Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Smith of Wootton Major, and painted the 1970 poster A Map of Middle-earth.
Did Pauline Baynes win any awards?
Yes. She won the 1968 Kate Greenaway Medal for A Dictionary of Chivalry, edited by Grant Uden, a reference book illustrated throughout its margins.
Were the Narnia illustrations originally in colour?
No. She drew them in pen and ink in black and white. For the 1998 centenary editions she coloured the original drawings herself.
Can I use Pauline Baynes illustrations in my designs?
No. She died in 2008, and her Narnia and Tolkien illustrations and maps remain in copyright. Study her line, borders and map layouts, then make your own drawings.
