In 1995 Heather Amery wrote a brief tale about a princess who took a liking to a messy piglet. She cleaned him up and introduced him to her family at the castle, kissing him on the snout. Straight away he changed into a prince, who was not to the liking of Mama, so the princess kissed him once more. “That’s better,” said the queen, “take him back to the sty and don’t kiss him again.” It was a neat joke, appealing to children while also being a witty variant of the “frog prince” tale, and its comedy was heightened by the accompanying portraits of all the characters, in the illustrations of Stephen Cartwright.

Under the usual dispensations, the book, despite its brevity, might have won laudatory reviews and encouraged critics to seek out further delights in the artist’s work. But the dispensations were not usual. The Princess and the Pig was but one integer in the series of Usborne’s Castle Tales, which were themselves aligned with companion series under such rubrics as Farmyard Tales, Myths and Legends (a sadly reductive group), First Experiments and What’s Happening — dozens of little books, mostly written by Heather Amery or Anne Civardi and all illustrated by Cartwright.

Few of these seem ever to have reached the desks of review editors or publicists, and if they did they were likely to be seen as yet another series of “class readers for infants”. As a publisher, Usborne leaned towards direct marketing. The multiple series and series-compendia over which he presided, along with attendant novelties such as jigsaws, sticker-books and “touchy-feely” books, were indeed geared to “beginning readers” but many were sold straight into schools or to families through a Books at Home scheme — Tupperware parties for Key Stage 1.

Cartwright proved a perfect collaborator in this commercial venture, which suited both his genial temperament and his graphic facility. Excelling in art at school in Bolton, where he had been born in 1947, he went on to the St Martin’s School of Art in London and then to the illustration course at the Royal College under the benign tutelage of Brian Robb and Quentin Blake.

He was naturally gifted both as draughtsman and colourist, and it was his and Usborne’s good fortune that soon after graduating Cartwright joined the fledgeling company and became a key contributor to its success, illustrating well over a hundred titles.

In his early work he adopted a fairly raw cartoon style for his illustrations — shades of Dudley Watkins and Leo Baxendale. In the Time Traveller series of the 1970s he combined large double-spread scenes, such as, say, a Viking farm, with strip cartoons of events taking place there: making bread and so forth.

In the prodigiously successful First Thousand Words, with Heather Amery (1979, and now issued in 50 languages) he produced a sequence of spreads, each surrounded by individual spot drawings of objects seen in them (a latterday reworking of the method of teaching through pictures pioneered 350 years ago in the Orbis Pictus of Amos Comenius).

In both cases Cartwright’s graphic energy was the salient feature — action going on all over the place — and this came to be enhanced by a visual gimmick that continued throughout his work: the incorporation in every page-opening of a small yellow duck, usually looking either worried or offended, whom the reader had to search out (“where’s Quacky?”).

As he and his authors developed their many story series, often under the professional eye of a “reading consultant”, Cartwright adopted a broader and warmer graphic style and the little books took on the character of comic strips progressing through turning pages. Here he worked his magic through fine colour juxtapositions and the deft portrayal of his characters’ features. In particular, the eyes and mouths of his princesses, gormless princes, and pigs, or of his other animals and his well-populated scenes of contemporary life conveyed a bonhomie which was typical of the artist himself. His books, with their omnipresent yellow duck, are still pored over with pleasure by children even though his joyous contribution has not been much recognised by the guardians of their literature.

Stephen Cartwright married Di Maggs, who survives him, along with their son and daughter.

Stephen Cartwright, children’s book illustrator, was born on December 28, 1947. He died on February 12, 2004, aged 56.