My wife Jane Eccles, who has died of cancer aged 58, was an artist who worked widely in the world of illustration, from magazine editorial work and advertising to books for many publishers.
She wrote and illustrated Maxwell Monster, in 1991, and increasingly specialised in illustrating books for children. Jane forged a fruitful relationship with the publisher Macmillan, for whom she filled the pages of children’s poetry and joke books with her warm and witty drawings.
She was born in Tehran, where her father, David, was working as an architectural illustrator; her mother, Zita (nee Boulton), had also studied art. Jane moved to London as a toddler and lived there until she moved to Hampshire in 2005. She attended St Teresa’s school in Sunbury, taking her A-levels at Kingston College.
Encouraged by her artistic parents, she loved drawing from a young age and was rarely without a sketchbook and pencil. She toyed with the idea of journalism for a short time, before finally deciding on an art degree. In 1977, Jane attended Central St Martin’s for her foundation year, then moved to Chelsea School of Art to study graphic design, where she increasingly focused on illustration.
After graduating in 1981, she worked for a few agencies but gradually moved towards freelance work, her sometimes meagre income supplemented by working as a part-time bookseller at Waterstones for seven years. She married me in 1995 and gave birth to our son, Theo, two years later.
In recent years Jane had also worked on private commissions, from wedding invitations and birthday cards to family portraits, each time demonstrating an uncanny knack of wittily capturing the essence of the people – and their pets – she was illustrating.
After being diagnosed with cancer four and a half years ago, Jane used social media to share her experience of the disease. She became a campaigner for the charities Second Hope and Breast Cancer Care, helping them to raise awareness of secondary breast cancer, and attended the Labour party conference in 2016 as a “breast cancer care change-maker”, her gentle eloquence and persistence making a lasting impact on the MPs she met there.
As well as Theo and me, Jane is survived by her father and her brother, Tim.
