Antony Maitland, who has died of cancer aged 90, was best known for his black-and-white line illustrations that played a central role in shaping the look of children’s novels of the 1960s and 70s.
His work was particularly associated with Leon Garfield’s historical novels, starting with Jack Holborn (1964) and including many of Garfield’s 12-volume series The Apprentices (1976-78). The atmospheric and detailed crosshatched line drawings created a vivid 18th-century England, lifted by touches of wit that perfectly matched Garfield’s elegant stories. But there was much other work, and Maitland did not wish to be pigeonholed as just Garfield’s illustrator, or confined to historical fiction.
Maitland’s career took off with unusual speed: he won the 1961 Kate Greenaway medal for his first commission: the illustrations for Mrs Cockle’s Cat by Philippa Pearce, who was already an award-winning novelist. Described as “a picture book with text by Philippa Pearce”, it benefited from the humorous touch that the images added to Pearce’s fanciful story.
At the time there was a boom in children’s fiction publishing, with new novels wrapped in lavish dust jackets and generously illustrated throughout. Maitland’s fine line and wash work fitted easily into this look, and invitations came for books by Eleanor Farjeon, Penelope Lively and Joan Aiken. And there were other commissions, such as a new edition of Andrew Lang’s The Green Fairy Book (1978), edited by Brian Alderson.
He also wrote and illustrated his own books, including The Secret of the Shed (1962) and Idle Jack (1977). In a beautiful and original format, designed to capture his love of theatre, he created Encore: A Pop-up Book of Scenes from the Theatre (1983), a picture book with moveable parts.
Maitland’s intricately designed covers, which cleverly incorporated the main characters and some detail of the action interwoven with hand-crafted lettering of the title and the author, gave a style and identity to children’s books. Maitland’s view was that “an illustration is ultimately part of a book – you’re concerned with the whole package”.
During an interview he summarised his success as having “a clear visual imagination. I know as soon as I read a text what things should look like: it goes click-click-click. It’s exciting to get to a passage which you know is incomplete – something that triggers off my visual imagination, which the author hasn’t really dealt with.”
While he liked his relationship with writers, he was clear that they could not describe what he should draw. “What you come up with in the end is certainly not what was in their mind, because you are illustrating what they haven’t written about. But it may be better … One likes to go parallel, but it’s a different process.”
Born in Andover, Hampshire, the fourth of six sons of Margaret (nee Kettlewell) and Air Vice-Marshal Percy Maitland, Tony (Antony) moved frequently in the first 15 years of his life, because of his father’s postings in the RAF; the family spent two years in Singapore, from 1937, and a similar spell in Germany, from 1947. While Singapore was remembered with delight for the comfort of the life and the wonderful excursions including month-long cruises, life in postwar Germany was somewhat bleaker.
But Maitland’s maternal grandparents provided a secure and welcoming base for the family, who spent Christmases at their large house in Somerset. Maitland attended Churcher’s college in Petersfield, Hampshire, where he had little interest in academic work, as he was convinced that he would become an artist.
After school he studied at the West of England College of Art (now the Royal West of England Academy), Bristol, graduating with a national diploma in design in 1957. As a student, Maitland always knew that illustration interested him most, but he was also gifted at theatre design and printmaking.
On graduating he won a Leverhulme research award that enabled him to spend a year studying in Europe before his two years of national service in the army. His 10 O-levels qualified him to become an officer, and so to take advantage of further travel opportunities in Europe. More followed in a small van before he returned to London, where he met his partner Roderick Taylor, an international management consultant and expert on Ottoman and Greek embroidery.
Throughout his life Maitland was also a versatile designer in many other fields, such as furniture and interior design, and took commissions from across the world. He designed the sets and costumes for a European film adaptation of The Goose Girl by the Brothers Grimm (which was never released), worked as a designer in the Middle East and as a portrait painter for the Shah of Iran. Late in life he focused almost entirely on illustration and concluded that “in the end, illustration is the most demanding and satisfying work”.
Maitland and Taylor, who took out a civil partnership in 2005, settled first in London and later in Thorndon, near Eye, Suffolk, where Maitland continued to live after Taylor’s death in 2017.
He is survived by his brother, Charles.