Watercolour over pencil, 23 by 18 cm

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

This is Baynes's outline cover design for Alec Seath Kirkbride's memoir A Crackle of Thorns published by John Murray in 1956 (see below for the final cover). 

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.