Peggy Fortnum, who has died aged 96, was the first person to create a visual image of Paddington Bear, the marmalade-loving bear from darkest Peru who stars in the children’s books by Michael Bond. She was commissioned to illustrate the first volume of adventures, A Bear Called Paddington, in black and white line drawings, in 1958, and worked on the next eight Paddington books. Thereafter, she illustrated a further three, the last in 1983, taking turns with other artists to shape the look and feel of the increasingly famous bear. In 1998 the books were relaunched in celebratory 40th birthday editions using Fortnum’s original illustrations.
From her first reading of the manuscript of A Bear Called Paddington, Fortnum was captivated by the talking bear. She visited London zoo to sketch and photograph Malayan bears as she wanted her Paddington to to be convincing. “At the beginning, I wasn’t sure of the anatomy,” she wrote. “I wasn’t sure what to do with his paws … It takes an age to get it right.”
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