Provenance: the artist's estate; Campbell Wilson Fine Art

Baynes designed the dust jacket for Daphne Fielding's memoir The Nearest Way Home in 1970. The book was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode for whom the artist was a regular designer. Fielding was a significant socialite in the 1920s and a former wife of the Marquess of Bath. This jacket design suggests the possibility that the author slightly changed the book's title at a later stage in its edit.

Anthony Baynes studied at the Slade School of Art where his 1946 painting The Betrayal (now in the collection of the UCL Art Museum) won the Mary Richgitz Prize. An accomplished designer of both murals, theatrical sets (briefly for Sadler's Wells in the 1940s) and decorated furniture, Baynes was a notable designer of dust jackets from the 1950s to the 1970s, working for publishers including John Murray, Capes and Eyre and Spottiswoode.