1. 48 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2015 September/October 2015 The Horn Book Magazine 49
Baynes’s map of Narnia.
IIllustrationbyPaulineBaynes©1998byC.S.LewisPTELtd.
The Woman Who Drew Narnia:
Through the Wardrobe with Pauline Baynes
by Vicky Smith
in the sky, while below and to the left
stands a row of tiny human figures.
These small pen-and-ink drawings
are among the many created by Pauline
Baynes to illustrate C. S. Lewis’s The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the
first volume in his Chronicles of Narnia,
published in 1950. Lewis likely found
Baynes through his friend J. R. R.
Tolkien, who had been captivated by
her portfolio while visiting his publisher
and who instantly asked that she be
commissioned to illustrate his Farmer
Giles of Ham (1949). Though Baynes’s
work for Tolkien came first (and her
1969 map of Middle-earth later became
iconic), arguably it was her work for
Lewis that established her reputation
and largely defined her to the general
public for the next fifty-plus years. In
addition to the original drawings for the
seven Narnia books, which were initially
published one per year from 1950
through 1956, she created Narnia art
for posters, anniversary editions, a besti-
ary, and more. If that image of Lucy and
Mr. Tumnus walking through the snow
is indelible, so is Baynes’s association
with the Lewis classics.
Like countless other children, I grew
up reading and loving the Chronicles
of Narnia, inhaling both Lewis’s words
and Baynes’s pictures till they are almost
completely inseparable in my memory.
On my childhood bedroom wall hung
her 1972 poster “A Map of Narnia and
Surrounding Countries” from the day
it was given to me, new, until we sold
my parents’ house nearly forty years
later. (Sadly, it shredded badly when
I tried to take it
down, a calamity I
still regret.)
It was in hopes of
understanding the
scope of Baynes’s
relationship with
the classic books
that I spent time
last fall exploring
the Pauline Baynes
Archive housed in
the Chapin Library
of Rare Books at
Williams College
in Williamstown,
Massachusetts.
Though the archive
has very little of her
original art for the 1950s-era editions
of the Narnia Chronicles (she sold or
gave away much of what she produced
for both Lewis’s and Tolkien’s works), it
holds a wealth of latter-year work—art
and notes—that gives insight both into
this defining relationship and into a
consummate professional at work.
Baynes’s career as
a book illustrator
began in 1942, when
she was just twenty.
When Tolkien
recommended her
to Lewis, she was
still very much an
unknown, working
for hire rather than
royalties. (In her
later years she noted
that, due to the
sustained popularity
of the Narnia books,
even quite modest
royalties would have
supported her for
life. Indeed, the price
for a single first edition of The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe eventually
exceeded what she was paid for her
illustrations.) She worked quietly and
The images are indelible. A little girl walks arm-in-arm with a faun
carrying an umbrella; they are walking away from readers into a
snowy wood. A smiling, bespectacled beaver works a treadle sewing
machine. A turreted castle rises by the shore, seabirds wheeling about
Vicky Smith is the children’s and teen editor at Kirkus Reviews. She lives and
works in a house in Maine situated next to a brook that, unfortunately, is not
occupied by beavers.

2. 50 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2015 September/October 2015 The Horn Book Magazine 51
Photo:BrianSibley.
constantly until her death in 2008; she
left behind a work in progress—a new
edition of Aesop’s Fables.
Baynes met Lewis only a few times
in person: first at an introductory
luncheon in 1949, after she had com-
pleted the illustrations for The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe, and once
or twice in London thereafter. The
bulk of their relationship was medi-
ated by the publisher, Geoffrey Bles,
or conducted through written corre-
spondence, and of course it ended in
1963 with Lewis’s death. C. S. Lewis
was not a particularly gracious col-
laborator. Though he was in the main
responsible for the decision to hire her,
he groused about her work behind her
back, sometimes quite churlishly. In a
1957 letter to Penelope Berners-Price,
the young daughter of some friends, he
wrote, “Thanks for your letter and the
pictures. You draw donkeys better than
Pauline Baynes does.” While this might
be interpreted as a generous indulgence
to a child, it’s all too easy to imagine
that he meant it.
To his writer friend Dorothy Sayers,
he was even less kind about Baynes.
Sayers had averred that Baynes’s
illustrations were “effeminate”; Lewis
responded in a 1955 letter:
The main trouble about Pauline B. is not
her femininity but her total ignorance of
animal anatomy. In the v. last book she
has at last learned how to draw a horse.
I have always had serious reservations
about her (this is sub sigillo). But she had
merits (her botanical forms are lovely),
she needed the work (old mother to
support, I think), and worst of all she
is such a timid creature, so “easily put
down” that criticism cd. only be hinted,
& approval had, on a second shot, to
be feigned. At any real reprimand she’d
have thrown up the job; not in a huff,
but in sheer, downright, unresenting,
pusillanimous dejection.
(He adds, “Of course she is effemi-
nate too.”) In exasperation at a Baynes
illustration of an “utterly un-numinous,
foreshortened Aslan” that Lewis rejected
from The Silver Chair in 1953, he sug-
gested to their publisher that the latter
“conduct Miss Baynes round the Zoo!”
Lewis’s “hinted-at” criticism may
have been delivered with what he felt
was a velvet paw, but it’s hard to imag-
ine that Baynes didn’t feel the sting.
In January of 1954, he remarked on
her illustrations for The Horse and His
Boy, saying,
It is delightful to find (and not only
for selfish reasons) that you do each
book a little bit better than the last—it
is nice to see an artist growing. (If only
you cd. take 6 months off and devote
them to anatomy, there’s no limit to
your possibilities).
Given the ferocious pace at which
both were working, that suggestion
seems actively unkind; perhaps an
awareness of this led to some “feigned”
approval in his next missive. “I say!” he
writes with what feels like forced jol-
lity in October of the same year about
her illustrations for The Magician’s
Nephew. “You have learned something
about animals in the last few months:
where did you do it.”
Where did she do it? Perhaps at
the zoo, perhaps from observation
elsewhere. Her professional library
contained a great many field guides and
other collections of animal studies, as
well as books on botany, architecture,
costume, furniture, interior decora-
tion, art history, religion, folklore, and
children’s literature. At the time of
her death, in August 2008, her library
comprised some two thousand volumes.
The consistency with which she added
reference material speaks of a constantly
engaged artistic mind.
(Pleasingly, her library also included a
goodly number of books by her col-
leagues, bespeaking another kind of
engagement. Joining books on armor,
tapestry, and the like are several of M.
Sasek’s tours of world cities; I Saw Esau,
by Peter and Iona Opie and illustrated by
Maurice Sendak; Shirley Hughes’s mem-
oir, A Life Drawing; and enough Alice
and Martin Provensen books to suggest a
completist approach to their oeuvre.)
Thanks to the continuing popular-
ity of the Narnia chronicles, Baynes’s
working relationship with the books
continued long after her illustrations
for the final title, The Last Battle,
were completed. Three major projects
emerged toward the end of her life, and
her approaches to all of them demon-
strate her dedication to her craft. The
first was a special edition of The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe published
in the UK in 1991, for which Baynes
created eighteen new color plates (one
per chapter, plus a frontispiece) and
stunning endpapers that depict Narnia
modulating from winter to spring
across the gutter. She scribbled notes
furiously on sketch paper, thinking
aloud, as it were, about the work before
her. “Aslan’s hair being cut?” she wrote
of the plate to accompany chapter
fourteen, when Aslan is sacrificed at the
Stone Table. “Oblong pic with smoke
breaking frame or crowd streaming out
of bottom…”
Baynes by the front hedge of her house, Rock Barn Cottage, in Surrey, England, in 2008.

3. 52 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2015 September/October 2015 The Horn Book Magazine 53
Baynes won the 1968 Kate Greenaway Medal for A Dictionary of Chivalry.
ADictionaryofChivalry.Illustration©1968byPaulineBaynes.
Looming over
Baynes’s illustrious
career was her
relationship with
C. S. Lewis and his
Narnia stories.
Next to a thumbnail of Aslan, she
did something of a word-association
exercise to capture the character:
“royal / strong / peaceful / royal [sic]
/ solemn / overwhelming eyes / sad.”
Interestingly, words like divine or
holy weren’t included. In an interview
done in the 1990s, she confessed that
she, like many, did not see the books’
Christian underpinnings “till long
afterwards. At the time, I thought they
were just marvellous stories.” By the
time she was working on these color
plates, however, she must have been
aware of the allegory, and she had
developed a significant reputation as
an illustrator of other religious works
(in fact, one of her last completed
works was an illustrated edition of the
Koran); still, she seems to have seen
Aslan primarily as a character rather
than a Christ figure.
Baynes’s next late-in-life Narnia proj-
ect was A Book of Narnians: The Lion, the
Witch and the Others (1994), a bestiary
featuring new illustrations. The text was
written by James Riordan to accompany
new art from Baynes, using Lewis’s
original words as a launchpad. Her notes
on the page proofs speak volumes about
the depth of her relationship with the
stories, if not with Lewis himself, as they
are littered with corrections, parsing the
differences among naiads, dryads, and
tree-spirits as well as between red and
black dwarfs. She sternly glosses mae-
nads as “Bacchus’ ‘madcap girls,’ not the
water or tree nymphs.” She clarified mat-
ters of plot as well; next to the entry on
Bree and Hwin, the talking Horses from
The Horse and His Boy, Baynes suggests
that the relationship between Shasta
and Aravis be clarified as well as the fact
that “the whole adventure takes place in
‘foreign’ lands.” (Riordan’s letters back
to her reflect humility and a profound
gratitude for her involvement—and
perhaps a touch of fear at her business-
like ferocity.)
Baynes did make one observation
that may well have been a decades-late
response to some of
Lewis’s anatomical carp-
ing, in a note accom-
panying an illustration
of the Beavers: “Lewis
describes whiskers but
beavers don’t actually
have whiskers,” she
wrote. Nevertheless,
in service to the text,
Baynes sketched whiskers onto Mr. and
Mrs. Beavers’ furry faces.
Her final Narnia project was to color-
ize her original black-and-white illustra-
tions for all seven books to celebrate
the centenary of C. S. Lewis’s birth in
1998. (A “deluxe” edition of The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe that com-
bined these colorized illustrations and
the 1991 color plates was also published
in the United States in 1997 with a seal
inaccurately commemorating its fiftieth
anniversary.) Again, to prepare, she
made notes on everything—on sketch
paper of course, but also on whatever
appeared to be at hand, including a
reminder card for a doctor’s appoint-
ment and another on which she’d
scrawled a telephone number. She took
the project very seriously, producing as
many as five different variations of one
small illustration, daubing the margins
with her working palette and occasion-
ally commenting on her choices.
Baynes won the Kate Greenaway
Medal in 1968 for Grant Uden’s Dic-
tionary of Chivalry and illustrated over
one hundred other books in the course
of her illustrious, decades-long career.
Still, looming over that career was her
relationship with Lewis
and his stories, and this
was evidently a matter
of some mild chagrin.
“I think it’s the fate of
the illustrator,” she told
her 1990s interviewer.
“Look at Ernest Shepard.
He was so brilliant and
did so much fine work,
but people only associate him with Pooh
and Piglet, and Toad of Toad Hall. It’s
the penalty of hitching your wagon to a
star.” But however she felt about Lewis,
however she felt about her career, she
did not appear to let it compromise her
engagement with her work.
In a moment of generosity, C. S.
Lewis responded to Baynes’s letter of
congratulations upon his winning the
1956 Carnegie Medal for The Last
Battle, acknowledging her contribu-
tions: “Is it not rather ‘our’ Medal?
I’m sure the illustrations were taken
into consideration as well as the text.”
Whether or not this is true of the award
committee is immaterial, since gen-
erations of children certainly have. As
legacies go, it’s not a bad one. n