Illustrators are prone to the indignity of being regarded as the secondary partners in books. Margery Gill, shortly before her death, was sent a reprint of her illustrated version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess with the pictures attributed to Margery Hill. It was a poor recognition of the distinctive qualities of her illustrative style. She had done few illustrations in the past 20 years, but her much-reprinted artwork for many children’s books is instantly recognisable to the experienced eye.

Margery Jean Gill was born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, in 1925. Her family moved to Hatch End when she was young and her early training was at Harrow Art School, moving on to the Royal College of Art where she specialised in etching and engraving. In 1946 she married the actor Patrick Jordan and with the coming of children “the need to earn, yet remain at home, turned me into an illustrator”.

She was fortunate at this time to come under the guidance of John Bell, who was transforming the children’s book publishing at the Oxford University Press. Her first work for him was a set of decorations for Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses in his Chameleon series and a set of drawings for a title, set in her native Scotland: The Treasure of the Isle of Mist won praises from its author, W. W. Tarn.

In the 1960s and 1970s she was a prolific contributor to almost every genre of children’s literature. She won commissions from houses such as Hamish Hamilton and The Bodley Head, whose designer, John Ryder, recorded in his Artists of a Certain Line (1960) her enjoyment of the struggle to get every drawing right and also “tearing in shreds the failures and starting again”.

She was scrupulous in seeking to reflect her authors’ texts and, where the atmosphere and landscape of a story demanded, as in stories by Ruth Arthur and William Mayne, she would travel to capture it. A German publisher, recognising this, gave her the job of illustrating Der Kampf um die Insel, a translation of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

Her preferred medium was pen-drawing and she showed a fine capacity for visualising a scene and achieving a convincing naturalness in the grouping and gestures of characters. She also had some renown for her portrayal of children, giving them a reflective sobriety at odds with conventional expectations. She once remarked “that is often how children are — taking their own lives seriously”. This effect was masked in some of her ventures into colour in fairytales such as Briar Rose (1972) and Jack and the Beanstalk (1974) but worked to perfection in one of her finest sets of illustrations, for Margaret Kornitzer’s book about adoption, Mr Fairweather and his Family (1960).

Those for whom she worked described Gill as an ideal partner in the making of illustrated books: sensitive to the needs of a commission and reliable in delivery from her studio in Suffolk. There she remained in later years, her zest in painting and drawing increasingly inhibited by arthritis and cataracts. Her younger daughter died in 1996 and she is survived by her other daughter and by her husband.

Margery Gill, illustrator of children’s books, was born on April 25, 1925. She died on October 31, 2008, aged 83