Illuminations: Pauline Baynes's fancies of another world
Pauline Baynes died on August 1 at the age of 85—one more light gone out from the golden age of children’s book illustration, an age that gave us Arthur Rackham’s fairies, Edmund Dulac’s Cinderella, Beatrix Potter’s spirited rabbits and E. H. Shepard’s Toad and Pooh. Not so celebrated in her own right, Baynes deserves to be remembered as the definitive cartographer of Narnia and Middle-earth, and quite possibly the best medievalesque illustrator of her time.