Watercolour and gouache, 24 by 16 cm

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

Sold with the printed proof of the final dust jacket

Their First Ten Years, Marion Lochhead's social history of childhood in the reign of Queen Victoria was published by John Murray in 1956. Baynes created several designs for the book's dust jacket, all of which centre around the vignette of a boy and a girl (the former holding a hoop). In the present design the artist fills the cover with this illustration, opting for a smaller vignette of the same subject against a more subdued wallpaper-style background in the final cover (see below).

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.