“Well, he did like to draw from life,” said a commissioning editor who had asked Peter Warner to bring her some specimens of his cat portraits. He arrived noisily in his much-loved

T-Spark Alfa Romeo and flung open his portfolio to reveal some spectacular studies of the female form. “The cats came later,” she said, “and were indeed very impressive.”

The anecdote indicates something of Warner's debonair professionalism emerging from not very propitious beginnings. He was born in 1939 to sympathetic parents. (His father was a piano restorer, his mother an artist.) His early years were disturbed by the war, the family being bombed out of their house in Mitcham in 1944. This left him with a degree of deafness and also resulted in his having to spend a summer season sleeping in a tent.

His regular education was also curtailed since he won a scholarship to the Wimbledon School of Art aged 11. From 1960 to 1963 he had a scholarship at the Royal Academy Schools, and his professional training was topped up in 1973 by an intensive course on printmaking at the Croydon College of Art.

Like many young artists he began his career as an illustrator, undertaking commercial work. This later led to design commissions from the manufacturers of products consonant with the direction of his art, such as Whiskas and Friskies. He also gained an introduction to the publisher Hamish Hamilton, for whom he illustrated a number of books in the Reindeer series of stories for young readers, for which his pen-drawing was particularly apt.

His love of nature, however, impelled him to specialise in landscape and animal drawing, especially cat portraiture, first found in his Guide to the Cats of the World (1976). In this work, both his artistry and his understanding of the behaviour and the anatomy of the species was evident. (A friend was startled to discover the corpse of a cat in his refrigerator, awaiting close physical examination.)

The conjunction of sympathy and accurate observation is best seen in two books, The Book of the Cat (1981) and Perfect Cats (1991) — his own favourite. This magnum opus describes every variety of domestic cat found throughout the world, illustrating each in colour with a brush so fine that every hair and its disposition seems to be displayed. He also worked for other authors, drawing wrappers for many of the books in the wideranging Animal Ark series and, most notably in recent years, fine line drawings for the Moon Cottage Cats stories by Marilyn Edwards.

Despite damage to his hearing Warner became a clarinettist of distinction, and was among the founders of the North Downs Wind Quintet and the North Downs Symphonia, harmonious rehearsals sometimes taking place at his Surrey home at Tatsfield. He also won many table tennis trophies in local leagues.

Peter Warner, artist and illustrator, was born on March 1, 1939. He died of cancer on September 22, 2007, aged 68