An Invitation to Live Life Deeper
A review of "Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the World of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien"
The best books are not just great words but great editing. You must choose what to leave out. This is true of a 1000-page history book, a novella, a poem, and especially, a picture book.
Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the World of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien by Katie Wray Schon is Waxwing Books’ latest release, hitting bookshelves on April 1, 2025.
Like many, I had never heard of Pauline Baynes, who died in 2008 after a long, full artist’s life. She was born in 1922 and moved to India, where her earliest memories took place. The illustrations by Katie Wray Schon are sweet and simply drawn, imagining the places and girlhood of Pauline Baynes. The story itself reads as many picture biographies of illustrators reads. The illustrator in question lived and experienced wonder, darkness and rediscovered beauty and the world through art and books.
What makes this story of Pauline Baynes worth telling other than her claim to fame in connection with Tolkien and Lewis?
What can Wray Schon add to the bookshelves of biographies?
Wray Schon allows the reader to bask longer in the wonder of books, inviting the reader into the interior wonder of the subject. The concept that reading takes us places is no surprise to any reader. But by slowing down the story with, sometimes, a mere five words on a page, the author invites us to be present and stay a moment and face the challenges of school isolation, of not fitting in, and then comes the wonder of story books.
Wray Schon takes us places through her illustrations as her titular character visits the faraway lands in storybooks. The book is rife with rabbit trails, as Sarah MacKenzie calls them. Readers may walk away with a library list to read Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Dr. Dolittle, inspiring books from an older era, along with Lewis and Tolkien, though if they have the excitement my children had about this book, they are already well acquainted with Narnia and Middle-Earth.
Personally, I like the emphasis on The Jungle Book, which takes place in India. Not only is it a source of imaginary travel for the titular character, but also at homecoming, and that familiar quality of story books is so important over a lifetime. When we return to a book, we feel we are returning to something familiar, comforting, and good. Books not only take us places, but they can also give us a sense of home when we have been taken from our homes or grown so old we can no longer visit the places of our childhood hearts.
We see Baynes begin her career like so many, and that time was interrupted by World War II, as it was so for many. Wray Schon communicates to the reader that this interruption is not an obstacle to be overcome but something that fuels her career later. If the readers are primarily interested in this artist because of her work with Lewis and Tolkien, they will be particularly interested in the fact that she illustrated maps for the British Navy during World War II. The work we do can feed our passion and enhance our skills, leading us to the breakthrough an artist needs to reach Bayne’s level.
“They fly from past to present from her hands all the way to yours. Book in hand, you only need to open it a crack to let a burst of wonder from Pauline's pictures shine through.”
That is the story.
Because of what books did for her, we, the readers of Narnia and Middle-Earth, can experience the same gift of books taking us to faraway places. It is a timeless gift that has been passed on. These are the messages that Wray Schon draws out of the life of Pauline Baynes.
My children love the little dragon courting for Lewis’s attention. They love the nuggets of stories in the illustrations that connect them to Bayne’s, like a mutual friend. As the parent reader, what I loved best was the back matter, more about Pauline. She meets the love of her life late in life, and they marry, but they are unable to have children.
Ten years later, he died.
But one day, his daughter “whom he lost track of during World War II in Germany, contacts Baynes.” Baynes became close to Fritz's children and their children. Through them, she received the gift of a family she never thought she would have.
“It was,” she said, “like something magical coming back at me through a wardrobe.”
Here, more than anywhere else in the story, I think we experience the final conclusion of what Katie Wray Schon is about in this story.
Books take us places.
They introduce us to a timelessness of magic that is unthinkable outside of them or outside of God and spirituality.
We enter the wardrobe through a picture book. We return back home again.
But with our imaginations in life and the world inside, the wardrobe comes back to us even apart from the book.
Painting Wonder paints a path into the world of dreams.
Katie Wray Schon dares to make the connection of these fantastical stories to everyday life. It is a connection we need to remember. Fantasy stories are not meant to be merely an escape from life but an invitation to live life deeper. And that is the wonder of it all.