Jan Pienkowski
Children’s book illustrator best known for the Meg and Mog series, and for his evocative silhouettes
JAN PIENKOWSKI, who has died aged 85, was a Polish-born illustrator known for his charmingly inventive children’s books, though he also designed for stage and opera productions.
His best-known books were the simple, comical Meg and Mog series, about a not-very-efficient witch and her pampered tabby cat, created with Helen Nicoll for very young children, and his pop-up books, a genre into which he breathed new life.
The first of these, Haunted House (1979), featured “a ghoul in the cupboard, an octopus in the sink, a crocodile in the bath, and in every room, a sinister black cat watching with roving eyes”. A perennial favourite with children who enjoy being spooked, it won the 1980 Kate Greenaway Medal.
He went on to create 17 more pop-up books, including Robot, Dinner Time, Good Night, Little Monsters and Botticelli’s Bed and Breakfast, an irreverent romp through the history of western art.
Pienkowski was also known for the wonderfully precise and evocative silhouette illustrations he created for collections of fairy tales by Joan Aiken and for his own Fairy Tale Library (six miniature books with stories by Perrault and Grimm).
His witches were truly gruesome, down to the last crooked tooth and hairy wart, and his princesses were lithe and enchanting, full of girlish grace. Indeed, his silhouettes were so finely detailed that when his Fairy Tale Library was reissued as The Fairy Tales in a larger format gift book in 2005, his publishers insisted on making adjustments for the more prudish American market, including removing Sleeping Beauty’s nipples.
The origins of his style came from Pienkowski’s memories of paper cut-outs, a traditional art form in Poland, where he was born on August 8 1936. “As a child, I would sit at the table cutting paper decorations for Christmas, and at Whitsun it was the custom for a local paper cutter to come to the house to make new paper curtains for the kitchen,” he recalled. “I loved watching, especially when she unfolded it all.”
Until he was eight the family lived in a village in a part of western Poland, annexed by Germany in 1939, where his father had a job as a bailiff on a country estate.
During the German occupation his grandmother was arrested for hiding a young British pilot and a Jewish colleague in her Warsaw apartment; she and her daughter, Jan’s aunt Zozia, were sent to Auschwitz, where they died of typhoid.
The young Jan knew nothing of this and recalled his life during the German occupation as an “idyll” of riding through snowy forests in a horse-drawn sleigh, milking cows and watching the local blacksmith at his forge. The forest of his childhood was a recurring motif in his silhouettes.
Being Polish under the Germans, Jan was not allowed to attend school. So his mother taught him to read and write and his father encouraged him to draw, while a next-door neighbour would read him fairy tales, “always stopping at a cliffhanger” to get him to drink his boiled milk.
He made his first book, aged eight, as a present for his father. It was a story of “road rage” featuring a man with a horse and cart.
Pienkowski’s family fled when the Russians came, and after working their way across Europe they arrived in England in 1946, eventually settling in Herefordshire. Jan attended the Cardinal Vaughan School in London and, despite knowing no English when he arrived in the country, went on to read English and Classics at King’s College, Cambridge.
There, he designed posters and sets for undergraduate theatre productions, and after graduating co-founded the successful Gallery Five design company, publishing greetings cards, posters and books.
These included, in the 1970s, his own Fairy Tale Library – the six miniature books being designed to be “small enough for a child’s hand” with a text translated from the original Perrault and Grimm by Pienkowski’s long-term partner, David Walser.
For some years Pienkowski worked as a freelance designer and illustrator for advertising companies and publishers, designing wallpaper for Coloroll and doing graphics for the BBC children’s TV series Watch!
He began making silhouettes almost by chance. Early in his career he had done a sample drawing to show a publisher, but, unhappy with the faces, he inked them in, and the drawing was accepted.
He developed the style notably in his work with Joan Aiken – and in 1971, their book The Kingdom Under the Sea won him the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. He also illustrated her A Necklace of Raindrops.
In the 1970s he got together with the children’s writer Helen Nicoll to collaborate on the Meg and Mog books. They would meet at a service station halfway between their homes (he always brought flowers, she smoked salmon).
The schematic drawing and bold primary colours of the series were very different from his silhouette work, and very different again from his inventively witty pop-up books.
Altogether Pienkowski created more than 60 books for children including the stories of Christmas and Easter as related in the King James Bible, illustrated with his silhouettes, which became bestsellers.
In the early days he drew in pencil and used hand-cut silhouettes, but later on he did most of his artwork on the computer and adapted some of his books, including The Haunted House, for CD-ROM.
Pienkowski retained a lifelong interest in stage design and was commissioned to provide designs for, among others, the touring company Théâtre de Complicité, and for Beauty and the Beast for the Royal Ballet.
Pienkowski and David Walser contracted a civil partnership on the first day it became possible in 2005.
Jan Pienkowski, born August 8 1936, died February 19 2022