Peggy Fortnum, who has died aged 96, was the first person to create a visual image of Paddington Bear, the marmalade-loving bear from darkest Peru who stars in the children’s books by Michael Bond. She was commissioned to illustrate the first volume of adventures, A Bear Called Paddington, in black and white line drawings, in 1958, and worked on the next eight Paddington books. Thereafter, she illustrated a further three, the last in 1983, taking turns with other artists to shape the look and feel of the increasingly famous bear. In 1998 the books were relaunched in celebratory 40th birthday editions using Fortnum’s original illustrations.
From her first reading of the manuscript of A Bear Called Paddington, Fortnum was captivated by the talking bear. She visited London zoo to sketch and photograph Malayan bears as she wanted her Paddington to be convincing. “At the beginning, I wasn’t sure of the anatomy,” she wrote. “I wasn’t sure what to do with his paws … It takes an age to get it right.”
She described her difficulties: “The line has to be expressive. I do lots of drawings. Humorous drawing is more difficult than any other kind of drawing. I remember an agent saying at the beginning ‘Anyone can draw bears.’” She also wanted the Browns, the family who give Paddington a home, to be realistic and easy to identify with; for authenticity, she borrowed a photograph of her nephew and his father walking through Victoria station in London and used them as models.
Her illustrations made the idea of a bear from Peru arriving at Paddington station with a suitcase and being adopted by an ordinary family seem perfectly reasonable. Fortnum’s benign style and kind eye matched the warmth of Bond’s story. As Bond said of Fortnum: “She thought very highly of Paddington, as I did of her. It was a happy combination.”
She was born in Harrow on the Hill, north-west London, the youngest of six children of Arthur Fortnum, a naval officer, and his wife, Mary (nee Hay), the daughter of the governor of Tobago. At St Margaret’s school, Harrow on the Hill, the only thing that interested Fortnum was painting and drawing. Enrolling at Tunbridge Wells School of Art in 1939 gave her the chance to develop her skills, but her time there was brief. In September 1940 she witnessed the bombing of London in broad daylight and decided to join the ATS. “I did not want to find myself on the inside being defended, but outside, helping to defend.”
She was badly injured in a transport accident when she fell through a broken door on a troop carrier and her leg was run over by a lorry. After a long convalescence, Fortnum returned to art school, this time in London, at the Central School of Art, where she became a friend of Judith Kerr. “Peggy Fortnum introduced us to various sentimental Victorian songs, which we used to sing at the top of our voices while we did the rather undemanding work,” Kerr wrote in her 2013 memoir, Creatures.
Fortnum and Kerr were both taught by the wood-engraver John Farleigh, who encouraged them to concentrate on illustration. From him, Fortnum learned to use a more relaxed line and to make more mess. Given confidence by Farleigh, who also assured her that she would find work as an illustrator so long as she never tackled talking animals wearing clothes, Fortnum developed a new style of pen and ink drawings in which, after some initial struggle, she became exceptionally skilled.
Farleigh took Fortnum’s illustrations to a publisher and she received her first commission, for Mary F Moore’s Dorcas the Wooden Doll (1944), the story of a wooden toy who comes alive, which was given charm and energy in Fortnum’s vigorous line drawings. From then on, Fortnum illustrated several books a year, ranging from folk stories to contemporary novels. She attracted praise in a feature in the Times Literary Supplement: “Her line is exquisite in its loose and nervous rhythm; she can create movement with what, out of context, would be a meaningless squiggle; she can suggest by a few doodles a storm-clouded sky or the hidden recesses of a candlelit room.”
After decades of success, creating illustrations to match stories including Leila Berg’s Little Pete Stories (1959), Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child (1970) and an edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon (1972), Fortnum began to turn down work, blaming her arthritis. But she continued to receive enthusiastic fan mail, all of which she did her best to answer. When she did so, she always added a drawing of the bear from Peru, clutching his hat as he rushes away, or hiding behind it.
In 1958 Fortnum married the artist and sculptor Ralph Nuttall-Smith. He was a keen sailor, and the couple settled on the Essex coast, in West Mersea, near Colchester, where Nuttall-Smith taught at the Colchester School of Art. He died in 1988; Fortnum is survived by two nephews, the film historian Kevin Brownlow and the sculptor John Fortnum.
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