He was born in Warsaw in 1936. After the fall of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, his family managed to flee Nazi German-occupied Poland and settled in England.
After graduating from King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and English, Pieńkowski set up a company producing pop-up Christmas cards, drawing illustrations for children’s books in his spare time.
Book illustrations soon became his main occupation.
Along with Meg and Mog, a series of illustrated adventures about a hapless witch and her stripy cat, and his pop-up books, Pieńkowski is known for his illustrations of fairytales by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, The Nutcracker, and The Glass Mountain: Tales from Poland.
The Guardian writes in an obituary that the artist’s work “was often inspired by his Polish childhood and experiences as a wartime refugee. His interest in paper cut-outs stemmed from his time in an air raid shelter in Warsaw, where a soldier had kept him amused by cutting newspapers into shapes for him.”
The daily quotes Francesca Dow, the managing director of Penguin Random House Children’s Books, as saying: “Jan was one of the great storytellers: an exceptionally talented creator, who was led by what interested him, and who treated children as his equals.”
Pieńkowski had more than 140 children’s books to his name. His honours included two Kate Greenaway awards, in 1971 with the writer Joan Aiken for The Kingdom Under the Sea, which was comprised of Eastern European fairytales, and in 1979 for the pop-up book Haunted House.
He died in London on Saturday, February 19.
(mk/gs)