Pauline Baynes created the illustrations for the first edition of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Baynes was an English illustrator whose black-and-white drawings became closely associated with The Chronicles of Narnia. She illustrated the Narnia books as they were published and helped establish the visual identity many readers still associate with the series.
Baynes also illustrated works by J.R.R. Tolkien, including Farmer Giles of Ham and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Her connection with Tolkien helped lead to her work for Lewis, who valued the clarity and imaginative detail of her pictures.
The first Narnia novel appeared in 1950. Baynes’s illustrations were not merely decorative: they helped distinguish characters, settings, and creatures in a fantasy world that Lewis built from Christian themes, classical mythology, fairy tales, and northern European legend.