Wayne Hammond, who wrote the entry on Pauline Baynes for British Children’s Writers, 1914-1960 (Dictionary of Literary Biography) and has been at work for some time on “an annotated collection catalogue” of her work, reported over the weekend
We’ve just had the sad news that Pauline Baynes, the esteemed artist, illustrator of Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, Smith of Wootton Major, Bilbo's Last Song, etc., and of Lewis’s Narnia books, passed away a few days ago at her home in Surrey. She would have turned 86 next month.
David Bratman responds here, by reminding us of Tolkien’s first reaction to Ms. Baynes’s illustrations for Farmer Giles: “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 [the Inklings] whose polite comment was that they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings.”
She will be missed, but her illustrations will never be forgotten. The one shown above is from Smith of Wootton Major.
(Obituary in The Guardian, The Independent.)
