Pauline Baynes was a prolific painter and designer who provided exquisitely detailed illustrations for numerous books and magazines, but she will always be associated with the work she did in the 1950s for C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.

It was on the recommendation of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Farmer Giles of Ham she had illustrated in 1949, that Baynes received the commission. She was only in her mid-twenties, but her role in creating Narnia cannot be underestimated. Lewis apparently complained that Baynes could not draw lions, but generations of readers have disagreed with him. Even after Aslan has been brought to cinema screens by the technical wizardry of CGI, Baynes’s illustrations, both on the books’ jackets and in their texts, retain the sort of primacy that Tenniel’s drawings do for the Alice books.

Ill-advised attempts to update the books by commissioning new jackets depicting the Pevensie children in jeans and sweatshirts only went to show that great illustrations are as timeless as the classics they adorn. The new look was rapidly abandoned, and Baynes was asked to revise and colour her drawings for centenary and other editions.

While they undoubtedly secured Baynes’s reputation, the Narnia illustrations did not make her fortune because she was paid a flat fee rather than a royalty, and throughout her career she undertook commercial work alongside the book illustration for which she will be remembered.

Among the books her drawings enlivened were Tolkien’s The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wotton Major and his Poems and Stories. Tolkien wanted her to illustrate The Lord of the Rings, but this proved financially unviable. Instead she designed a cover for the single-volume paperback edition: two contrasting landscapes framed by bare trees and one of the most instantly recognisable jackets in publishing history.

The rabbits she drew for the cover of the bestselling Puffin edition of Richard Adams’ Watership Down are equally familiar, and other well-known children’s books she illustrated include Mary Norton’s The Borrowers Avenged (1982), Beatrix Potter’s Wag-by-Wall (1987), two volumes of nursery rhymes edited by Iona and Peter Opie, and — in spite of her frank admission that she couldn’t really draw horses — Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1984).

Pauline Diana Baynes was born in Brighton in 1922, but spent her early childhood in Agra, where her father was a commissioner in the Indian Civil Service. At the age of 5 she and her sister Angela, to whom she was exceptionally close, were sent back to England for their education. After an unhappy period at a convent school, she moved to Beaufront School, Camberley, where she was very nearly expelled for bad behaviour. “Secretly we love the naughty ones the best,” the joint headmistresses, Miss Creed and Miss Richards, later confessed, and they invited her back to teach art. Before that, Baynes attended Farnham School of Art in Surrey and spent two terms at the Slade School of Fine Art in Oxford, but she never acquired any professional qualifications.

In 1940 she and Angela, who was also a talented painter, joined the Camouflage Department and Training Centre at Farnham Castle as model makers, working alongside fellow artists such as Julian Trevelyan and Roland Penrose. She subsequently drew charts for the Admiralty at their Hydrographic Department in Bath — useful training for the detailed maps that Baynes would produce of both Narnia and Middle-Earth.

After the war she kept house for her widowed father. Though never short of admirers, she was exacting: one suitor, serving in a smart Highland regiment, was dismissed because she did not like the fussy way he smoothed his kilt under him as he sat down.

The high standards she demanded of both herself and others were apparent when she started teaching at Beaufront: she was inclined to hand back work with a tart “Not quite”, but this encouraged pupils to work all the harder to please her.

Among those she inspired to follow in her own career was the painter and author of children’s books Amanda Vesey. Another pupil likened Baynes to the Mary Poppins of P. L. Travers (rather than Disney), but her appearance in the drab postwar world of a girls’ school was not in the least nanny-like. She favoured bright clothes and lots of bracelets, she lacquered her nails pink, and she wore coloured ribbons in her hair which stood out from her head in a Pre-Raphaelite aureole.

Baynes had already embarked on her career as an illustrator, working for the Perry Colour Books series and Country Life. Her first book as both writer and illustrator was Victoria and the Golden Bird (1948). This story of a small girl flown to many different countries allowed Baynes to exploit her lifelong interest in other cultures: one of the last projects she completed was a series of illustrations based on the Koran.