Kate
Greenaway (Catherine Greenaway) was a children's book illustrator
and writer. Her first book, Under The Window (1879), a collection
of simple, perfectly idyllic verses concerning children who endlessly
gathered posies, untouched by the Industrial Revolution, was a best-seller.
The
Kate Greenaway Medal is awarded annually by the UK Chartered Institute
of Library and Information Professionals to an illustrator of
children's books.
New
techniques of photolithography enabled her delicate watercolors
to be reproduced. Through the 1880s and 90s, in popularity her
only rivals in the field of children's book illustration were
Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, himself also the eponym of
a highly-regarded prize medal. 'Kate Greenaway' children, all
of them little girls and boys too young to be put in trousers,
according to the conventions of the time, were dressed in her
own versions of late eighteenth 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's 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 that called themselves
"The Souls" and embraced the Arts and Crafts movement
dressed their daughters in Kate Greenaway pantaloons and bonnets
in the 1880s and 90s.
She
lived in an arts and crafts house she commissioned from Richard
Norman Shaw in Frognal, London. |
