Jan Pieńkowski was born to farm manager and scientist parents in Warsaw, Poland in 1936, immigrating to England with his refugee family in 1946. Following his studies in English and Classics at King's College, University of Cambridge, he became a notable children's book illustrator, his designs often showcasing his signature cut-out silhouettes. Since 1972 he has become best known for his illustrations for the Meg and Mog books by Helen Nicoll.
Illustrator and writer Jan Pieńkowski was born to Jerzy, a farm manager, and Wanda (née Garlicka), a scientist, in Warsaw, Poland on 8 August 1936. He was three years old when the Second World War began. After a two-year period moving through Bavaria, Austria and Italy, Pieńkowski’s family eventually settled as exiles in Herefordshire, England in 1946. There he attended Lucton School, followed by Cardinal Vaughan School in London, and he later read English and Classics at King’s College, University of Cambridge, despite having arrived in the country without knowing any English. Although he was studying literature, Pieńkowski was ‘busy illustrating for Granta magazine and designing posters for university theatre productions’, and in the process developed ‘a lifelong interest in stage design’ (Styles, 2022).
After his studies, Pieńkowski founded the Gallery Five greetings card company with his university friend, Angela Holder, while also illustrating children’s books in his spare time. He began working with children’s author Joan Aiken in 1968, and that year they published A Necklace of Raindrops. Together they won the Kate Greenaway award in 1971 for their second collaboration, The Kingdom Under the Sea, which was ‘composed of the eastern European fairy tales that were close to Pieńkowski’s heart and featured an early appearance of his beautiful silhouette illustrations’ (Styles, 2022). It was the silhouette that became Pieńkowski’s signature style in books for older children, stemming from a wartime experience in an air raid shelter in Warsaw, where a soldier entertained the young Pieńkowski by cutting newspapers into interesting shapes.
In the early years of his career, Pienkowski was employed as a live drawer on Watch!, a children’s television programme on the BBC. Through this work he met Helen Nicoll, then the producer of the show, with whom he would co-create the well-known Meg and Mog books. First published in 1972, the Meg (the witch) character in the series was a visual manifestation born out of Pienkowski’s own childhood nightmares. While his parents were ‘perpetually busy’ on their farm in Poland before the war, Pienkowski’s nanny had told him frightening stories of a witch, later leading him to conclude that ‘I think Meg was really sublimating, isn’t that the word? Taking this terrible monster from my childhood and making it into a harmless toy’ (Flood, 2008). Over the following four decades Pienkowski continued to work with Nicoll to produce 16 titles, selling more than 3 million copies in the UK alone. In addition to collaborating with writers, Pieńkowski also authored his own books. In 1979 he published his famous and much-admired Haunted House, for which he won his second Greenaway award, ‘the first time a pop-up was treated with serious critical acclaim’ (Eccleshare, 1999). This ‘deliciously scary yet funny pop-up book changed what could be achieved through paper engineering’, and he continued to explore this technique and genre in Robot (1981) and Little Monsters (1986) (Styles, 2022).
During his interview for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2009, Pieńkowski ‘almost broke down’ when talking about the Second World War and his migration to England, ‘saying that shrill sounds and screaming still frightened him’ (Styles, 2022). He also spoke about his 40-year relationship with his collaborator and partner, David Walser, with whom he contracted a civil partnership in Richmond the first day this was possible in 2005. It was from this partnership that the Nut Cracker book was produced in 2008, the original Prussian story translated by Walser and illustrated by Pieńkowski. In this book his ‘cut-out silhouettes marry tinselly, glittery backgrounds evoking a 19th-century Christmas with the often-nightmarish images of the story’ (Flood, 2008). After Nicoll’s death in 2012, her Meg and Mog legacy was continued through additional publications by Pieńkowski and Walser. 2012 also saw Pieńkowski as keynote speaker at the North London Literary Festival at Middlesex University, Hendon. There he spoke about his work as an illustrator, showing samples of his books in the hope of helping ‘young people if they want to go on and make a career as an illustrator’ (Moorhead, 2012).
Despite having lived in England for over 70 years, Pieńkowski always pondered over his position as ‘the immigrant’, while also being deeply and emotionally attached to his status as a British citizen (Flood, 2008; BBC, 2009). He lived most of his life in England with Walser at their home in Hammersmith, west London, and the pair exhibited together at the Art House Open Studios Festival, in nearby Richmond upon Thames in 2019, where they showed watercolours, drawings, pastels and pottery. In the same year Pieńkowski also won the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award. Following complications of dementia, Jan Pieńkowski died on 19 February 2022 in England. First editions of his illustrated books are held in the UK public domain by the National Trust Collection’s Museum of Childhood, and his posters and prints are held in the V&A Collection. Examples of his children's book illustrations were included in Ben Uri's 2017 survey exhibition Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain. In 2024 Pienkowski was profiled in the BBC Radio 4 programme: 'Meg, Mog and Me'.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jan Pieńkowski]
Publications related to [Jan Pieńkowski] in the Ben Uri Library