Kate Greenaway

Catherine Greenaway (17 March 18466 November 1901) was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her

children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning greetings card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer Edmund Evans printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evans continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s.

The depictions of children in imaginary 18th-century costumes in a Queen Anne style were extremely popular in England and internationally, sparking the Kate Greenaway style. Within a few years of the publication of Under the Window Greenaway's work was imitated in England, Germany, and the United States.

Childhood

thumb|Pencil drawing of John Greenaway at work, by [[Birket Foster]]

Kate Greenaway was born in Hoxton, London, the second of four children, to a working-class family. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a dress maker and her father, John, an engraver who gave up steady employment with Ebenezer Landells' engraving firm to strike out on his own. When Greenaway was very young, he accepted a commission to provide the engraved illustrations to a new edition of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, sending his young family away to relatives in the countryside to give himself solitude while producing the engravings. Kate's earliest memories are of Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, which affected her deeply. It was a place she returned to frequently in her childhood.

The publisher who commissioned John Greenaway's work went bankrupt, leaving the family without an income.

The family lived in the flat above the shop, and young Kate, often left to her own devices to explore,

As a young child Greenaway's parents taught her at home; later she was sent to various dame schools; before going to the Royal Female School of Art. The two young women worked diligently in their studio to perfect their skills. At this point she was allowed to draw human figures, at first from plaster casts and then from models dressed in historical or ornamental costumes, skills she applied during the summers in Rolleston. However, she was unable to fully master human anatomy; frustrated that nude models were not permitted in the women's classes, she enrolled in night classes at Heatherley School of Fine Art where she met Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, and Walter Crane. Her reputation was built on the awards she had won while completing the National Art Courses, and buttressed with early exhibitions. She exhibited a set of fairy watercolours in 1868, which she sold to W. J. Loftie, publisher of People's Magazine. He set them to verse and printed them in his magazine. A year later Frederick Warne & Co purchased six illustrations for a toy book edition of "Diamonds and Toads", printed by Joseph Martin Kronheim, which took a year to complete. where she studied masters such as Jan van Eyck, whose Arnolfini Portrait she especially liked.

Freelance years

The new, popular and lucrative card market coincided with the end of Greenaway's formal training. Card maker Marcus Ward & Co hired Greenaway in 1871 on a freelance basis. Her cards sold well, and early Valentines sold 25,000 copies in weeks.

Under the Window

Her first book, Under the Window (1879), a collection of simple, perfectly idyllic verses about children, was a bestseller.

Later years and death

thumb|upright=0.9|The house in [[Frognal built for Kate Greenaway by Richard Norman Shaw]]

In the 1880s, the most popular designers of bookplates were Greenaway, along with Crane and Aubrey Beardsley. Their work exhibited intricate Art Nouveau elements with flowing vines and floral patterns.

Greenaway was elected to membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1889. She exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. She lived in an Arts and Crafts style house she commissioned from Richard Norman Shaw in Frognal, London, although she spent summers in Rolleston.

Greenaway died of breast cancer in 1901, at the age of 55. She is buried in Hampstead Cemetery, London.

Style

Greenaway's paintings were reproduced by chromoxylography, by which the colours were printed from hand-engraved wood blocks by the firm of Edmund Evans. Through the 1880s and 1890s, her only rivals in popularity in children's book illustration were Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott.

"Kate Greenaway" children, all of them girls and boys too young to be put in trousers, were dressed in her own versions of late 18th century and Regency fashions: smock-frocks and skeleton suits for boys, high-waisted pinafores and dresses with mobcaps and straw bonnets for girls. The influence of children's clothes in portraits by British painter John Hoppner (1758–1810) may have provided her some inspiration. Liberty of London adapted Kate Greenaway's drawings as designs for actual children's clothes. A full generation of mothers in the liberal-minded "artistic" British circles who called themselves The Souls and embraced the Arts and Crafts movement dressed their daughters in Kate Greenaway pantaloons and bonnets in the 1880s and 1890s.