Gouache and watercolour over pencil, 22.5 by 15 cm

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

Baynes designed the dust jacket for Sir George Rendel's diplomatic memoir The Sword and the Olive in 1957 for the publisher John Murray for whom he was a regular illustrator. The final jacket design varies very slightly from the present work, the decorative crests being placed next to each other in landscape form allowing more space for text in the lower part of the jacket.

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.