| Kate
Greenaway was one of the most popular figures in British book illustration
in the latter part of the 19th Century, rivalled only by Walter Crane and
Randolph Caldecott. She is best known for sugar-sweet pictures of little
children and girls in bonnets.
The
steady popularity of Kate started with her publication of Christmas cards.
Their originality and delicate style were immediately popular. Her
subjects were usually young children, flowers, and sketchily-finished
quaint landscapes.
Her children are dressed in Kate's versions of Georgian and Regency
fashions ... dresses which were adapted by Liberty of London for actual
children. Her light, sketchy style was uncommon at the time, with the
traditional illustrators trying to get as much detail and
"verisimilitude" into their drawings as possible.
From
1871 she produced a variety of designs for Christmas and Valentine cards
for Messrs. Marcus Ward. When this work stopped in
1877, she started to design book illustrations for Edmund Evans, printer
of both Crane and Caldecott. Greenaway's style was to draw in watercolour,
and successfully transferring her drawings to the woodblock was
costly. As well as her book illustrations, Greenaway exhibited her
watercolours at the Royal Academy from 1877, and had a widely praised
exhibition of her work at the Fine Arts Society in 1891.
Her
first published illustrations appeared in such magazines as Little
Folks. In 1879 she produced her first successful book, Under the
Window, followed by The Birthday Book (1880), Mother Goose (1881),
Little Ann (1883), and other books for children, which had an
enormous success and became very highly valued.
In
1885 Kate Greenaway's Alphabet was published with each
letter a coloured illustration by Kate Greenaway, London: George Routledge
(a re-issue of the individual letters in The English
Spelling-Book, 1885)
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