The artist and teacher Dodie Masterman, who has died aged 91, was best known for the illustrations she provided for classic novels, in which she perfectly captured mood and atmosphere. She was born Rhoda Glass in Brixham, Devon, into a family rich in melodrama. Her father was a car dealer, whose Russian-Viennese Jewish parents had arrived in England in the 1890s to escape pogroms. Her mother's affair with a dancing instructor led to a bitter divorce when Dodie was six. She never saw her mother again, and escaped from the trauma into a world of make-believe, constantly drawing. She spent her holidays in the Stroud valley, Gloucestershire, with her maternal grandmother, who introduced her to the Victorian era, a recurrent theme in Dodie's work.
Dodie went to the Slade School of Art between 1934 and 1938, winning more prizes than anyone before her. The Slade had, she wrote, a "cult of draughtsmanship of an extremely demanding standard, but remarkably little firm leadership in painting"; the life drawing classes were so stilted and devoid of context that she and a few friends moved their easels into the corridors and painted each other there, set against background. They admired the French post-impressionists and, keen to wear that mood, raided markets for vintage blouses.
Vladimir Polunin, who had designed sets for Diaghilev, taught her stage design, and his classes were the most fruitful of her Slade days. She recalled: "His department [known as the Zoo] provided a way to see things as a whole design while being a realm of fantasy." Her early paintings show the influence of the Euston Road School and she was on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group.
In 1940 she married Standish Masterman, a scientist who researched rocket fuels until he was transferred to non-secret work in 1954 because he had been a member of the Communist party. During the war, the Mastermans were evacuated to Swansea, where they met Dylan Thomas, and they met him again by chance in a lift in New York in 1950. Once when Standish left the room, Thomas threw himself across the sofa at Dodie, announcing: "Quick, he'll be back in a moment!" She rejected his advances. Dodie said: "It wasn't my scene, but had it been my scene Dylan wouldn't have done it."
Her first solo exhibition was at the Leger Galleries, London, in 1945. This led to book illustrations, beginning with Les Diaboliques by Barbey D'Aurevilly (1947). She drew for Vogue, and was so good-looking that she modelled hats for it, too; and did dust jackets for Phoenix House and covers for Dent's Everyman series.
In the 1950s her illustrations for the Jane and Peter primary readers used her son Fairless, who had been born in 1953, as a model. Most of her illustrative work was for the Folio Society, including Balzac's Eugénie Grandet (1953), Murger's Vie de Bohème (1960), Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1965), and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1975). She did line drawings, etchings, aquatints, lithographs and monotypes for the Folio Society, but its house style constricted her talents, rarely allowing her the luxury of colour. Her final Folio title, The Secret Garden (1986) ran to four editions. For this, she used as models her neighbours in Heyshott, West Sussex, where she had a cottage; her other home was in Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park. She taught drawing at Camberwell School of Art between 1945 and 1965.
From Dodie's monotypes were developed her reverse paintings on glass, a reworking of a 19th-century technique. Her interest in garden design, love of literature and passion for the gothic were united in her obsession with Tennyson's poem Maud, and she was involved with The Enchanted Moan, a journal devoted to it.
She was also the personification of the Saturday Book ideal, that mid-20th century publication that celebrated "Englishness" without being insular. Like the annual books' other contributors, she collected "stuff", music covers to magic lantern slides, scraps of Staffordshire pottery, all picked up for a song on Portobello Road and assembled into groups harmonious in pools of light in her homes.
One of her greatest passions, the result of an exhibition at Heal's in the 1940s, was for the imagery of the toy theatre. Her friend George Speaight, its leading impresario, acknowledged her "acute eye for its singularities and draughtsmanship". Dodie's ability to recognise the visual language shared by high and low art, and thus to identify the sources of popular prints, was unique, and she was the first to place the juvenile drama in an art historical context. She was an authority on hand colouring its images, learning the old techniques from Lucy Adlam, the last of the true tuppence colourists, who told her the secret of using pork rind ("beef would not do") to prevent stencils from slipping.
Standish died in 1994 and Dodie's health declined, but even in extreme old age, the intensity of her gaze when poring over a favourite print would always be accompanied by an enthusiastic: "Oh, how lovely!"
She is survived by Fairless and by her granddaughter, Oceana.