Book illustrator; Born September 9, 1922; Died August 1, 2008.

Pauline Baynes, who has died aged 85, was one of the foremost children's book illustrators of the twentieth century. She was discovered by JRR Tolkien but was best known for her work on the Chronicles of Narnia by Tolkien's friend, CS Lewis.

Born in Brighton, Baynes spent her early years in India, where her father was a civil servant. She returned to England aged five with her mother and sister and later spent time at the Slade School of Art in London, where she studied design.

During the war she made models for the Royal Engineers' camouflage unit and then moved to the Admiralty, drawing maps and charts.

Contact with a publisher in the camouflage unit led to her first professional commissions in the early 1940s. By the end of the decade she had amassed a respectable body of work. Then came Tolkien.

In 1948. samples from Baynes's portfolio were seen by Tolkien and he asked her to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham. When The Hobbit appeared in a single print run as a Puffin edition in 1961, she provided the cover for it. Meanwhile, her association with Tolkien led her to meet CS Lewis and she was commission to illustrate the book for which she is best remembered: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. Six more Narnia volumes were to follow, concluding with The Last Battle, in 1956.

Although her other work is overshadowed by her connections to Lewis and Tolkien, Baynes had a long and successful career, especially with Puffin. Other titles she illustrated included: The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes (1963); Recipes from an Old Farmhouse (1966); A Dictionary of Chivalry (1968); Spider and Snail (1972); The Enchanted Horse (1981), The Story of Daniel (1986) and The Moses Basket (2003).

Almost by accident, she developed a reputation as an illustrator of mostly Christian works and, to redress the balance, one of her last pieces was a series of designs for selections from the Koran, scheduled for publication in next year.

In 1961, she married a German ex-prisoner of war, Fritz Otto Gasch. They set up home in a small village just outside Farnham. Fritz died in 1988.