Catherine Greenaway (17 March 1846 - 6 November 1901) was a Victorian children's book illustrator and writer whose work influenced the children's style of the day. The only daughter of a successful draftsman and wood engraver, she studied graphic design and art between 1858 and 1869.
Her first book, "Under the Window" was an instant best seller and brought her celebrity, and was followed by the equally popular and critically successful "The Birthday Book" (1880), Mother Goose (1881) and "Little Ann" (1883). Concurrently, she developed a career as a water-colorist; with illustrators Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, Greenaway's work revolutionized the children's book market. In the late 1870s Greenaway initiated a collaboration with printer and engraver Edmund Evans which lasted two decades.
Video Kate Greenaway
Early life
Kate Greenaway was born in Hoxton, London, the second of four children, to a working-class family. Elizabeth Greenaway was a dressmaker and John Greenaway a wood engraver, whose business failed when he took a commission to engrave illustrations for Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers from a publisher who went bankrupt. As a young girl Kate lived with relatives in Rolleston, Nottinghamshire. John wanted to work without interruptions on the Dickens's engravings and sent the entire family away for about two years, a period that for Kate, according to children's literature scholar Humphrey Carpenter "was crucial ... she felt it to be her real home, a country of the mind that she could always reimagine."
On the return of his wife and children the family moved to Islington, living in the flat above a millinery shop Elizabeth Greenaway opened to provide an income. There was a garden outside the building, which Greenaway wrote about in letters and an unfinished autobiography in the 1880s, describing it as place with "richness of colour and depth of shade." Her father took on work for The Illustrated London News, often bringing home the wood blocks to carve during the night. Kate was interested in her father's work, and through him was exposed to the work of John Leech, John Gilbert and Kenny Meadows.
Maps Kate Greenaway
Education
As a young child Kate was educated at home and sent to series of dame schools. When she was about 12 she began formal art education when she enrolled in the National Course of Art instruction, first at Finsbury School of Art and later at the South Kensington School of Art headed by Richard Burchett. The curriculum was design-based with a focus on technical skills, with emphasis on geometric and botanical designs to create patterns for architectural elements such as decorative wallpapers and tiles. She completed the five stages of ornamental courses in one year and the ten stages of the drawing courses with similar speed. In 1864, she completed the final course, "Elementary Design", winning a national bronze medal for her designs. Later awards included a national silver medal in 1869 for a set of geometric and floral decorative tiles that "display charming harmonies of colour", according to biographer M. H. Spielmann.
She later attended the Royal Female School of Art. With classmate Elizabeth Thompson, Greenaway augmented her studies by learning to draw from the nude. The two young women rented a studio in South Kensington for a year for the purpose. At the school she did have the opportunity to work from models dressed in historical or ornamental costumes, skills she applied during the summers in Rolleston. But she continued to be frustrated that nude models were not permitted in the women's classes, so enrolled in night classes at Heatherley School of Fine Art where she met Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter and Walter Crane. In 1871 she enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art.
Early work
By 1867 she began to receive commissions, in part the result of the national awards she received and in part because of exposure at exhibitions. The publisher of People's Magazine, W. J. Loftie purchased a set of six watercolours Greenaway exhibited in 1868, printing them in the magazine set to verse written by his contributors. A year later Frederick Warne & Co purchased six illustrations for a toy book edition of Diamonds and Toads.
Career
Her first book, Under the Window (1879), a collection of simple, perfectly idyllic verses about children, was a bestseller.
As well as illustrating books Greenaway produced a number of bookplates.
Later years and death
Greenaway was elected to membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1889. 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. The style was often used by painter Maude Goodman in her depictions of children.
Legacy
The Kate Greenaway Medal, established in her honour in 1955, is awarded annually by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK to an illustrator of children's books.
Books illustrated
Gallery
References
Sources
- Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. (1984). The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-211582-0
- Danger, Sara R. "Producing the Romance of Mass Childhood: Kate Greenaway's 'Under the Window' and the Education Acts". Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Vol 31, No 4, Dec. 2009. 311-333
- Devereux, Jo. The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professional. Jefferson, NC: Macfarland, 2016. ISBN 978-0-7864-9409-5
- Ray, Gordon Norton. The Illustrator and the book in England from 1790 to 1914. New York: Dover, 1991. ISBN 0-486-26955-8
- Spielman, M. H., George Layard. Kate Greenaway London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905
Further reading
- Robert W. Kiger (ed.), Kate Greenaway: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Original Artworks and Related Materials Selected from the Frances Hooper Collection at the Hunt Institute, 1980: ISBN 0-913196-33-9
- Taylor, Ina. The Art of Kate Greenaway: A Nostalgic Portrait of Childhood London, 1991. ISBN 0-88289-867-1
- Shuster, Thomas E. and Rodney K. Engen, Printed Kate Greenaway: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1986. ISBN 0-9511752-0-3
External links
- Works written by or about Kate Greenaway at Wikisource
- Works by Kate Greenaway at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Kate Greenaway at Internet Archive
- Kate Greenaway's books, full-text searchable with all images from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Digital Collection at the University of Florida Libraries
- Greenaway Papers de Grummond Collection, University of Southern Mississippi
- Frances Hooper Kate Greenaway Collection Carnegie Mellon University Library
- Kate Greenaway at Library of Congress Authorities, with 84 catalogue records
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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