Greenaway, Kate (1846–1901)

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Greenaway, Kate (1846–1901)

English illustrator of children's books whose particular style proved widely influential, making her a household name at home and abroad and spawning a host of imitators. Born on March 17, 1846, in Hoxton, London, England; died on November 6, 1901, in Frognal, Hampstead, London, of breast cancer; daughter of John Greenaway (an engraver and woodcut maker) and Elizabeth (Jones) Greenaway; studied at the Finsbury School of Art, the National Art Training School, Heatherley's School of Art, and Slade School of Art; never married; no children.

Published first book illustration (1867); established herself as a freelance illustrator (c. 1872); achieved independent success with Under the Window (1879); published Kate Greenaway's Birthday Book (1880).

Writings—all self-illustrated:

Under the Window: Pictures and Rhymes for Children (Routledge, 1878); (verses by Mrs. Sale Barker) Kate Greenaway's Birthday Book for Children (Routledge, 1880); Art Hours: After Kate Greenaway (McLoughlin, 1882); Steps to Art: After Kate Greenaway (McLoughlin, 1882); Kate Greenaway's Almanack for 1883–95, 1897 (14 volumes, Routledge, 1882–96); Language of Flowers (Routledge, 1884, featured in The Complete Kate Greenaway, Century House, 1967); Kate Greenaway's Alphabet (Routledge, 1885); Marigold Garden: Pictures and Rhymes (Routledge, 1885); A Apple Pie (Routledge, 1886); Kate Greenaway's Book of Games (Routledge, 1889); Kate Greenaway's Pictures from Originals Presented by Her to John Ruskin and Other Personal Friends (F. Warne, 1921); (ed. by Edward Ernest and Patricia Tracy Lowe) The Kate Greenaway Treasury: An Anthology of the Illustrations and Writings of Kate Greenaway (World Publishing, 1967); (ed. by Bryan Holme) The Kate Greenaway Book (Viking, 1976).

Illustrator:

Diamonds and Toads, in the "Aunt Louisa's London Toy Books" series (F. Warne, 1871); Marie Aulnoy, Madame d'Aulnoy's Fairy Tales (9 vols., Gall & Inglis, 1871); Aunt Cae (pseudonym of Henry Courtney Selous), The Children of the Parsonage (Griffith & Farran, 1874); Kathleen Knox, Fairy Gifts; Or, A Wallet of Wonders (Griffith & Farran, 1874); Knox, Seven Birthdays; Or, The Children of Fortune ([London], 1875); (with Walter Crane) Quiver of Love: A Collection of Valentines, M. Ward (1876); Fanny LaBlanche, Starlight Stories Told to Bright Eyes (Griffith & Farran, 1877); Lady Colin Campbell (pseudonym of G.E. Brunefille), Topo (M. Ward, 1878); Charlotte Mary Yonge, Heir of Redclyffe (Macmillan, 1879); Yonge, Heartsease (Macmillan, 1879); George Weatherly, The "Little Folks" Painting Book (Cassell, 1879); Mother Goose; Or, The Old Nursery Rhymes (Routledge, 1881); Myles Birket Foster, Day in a Child's Life (Routledge, 1881); Ann and Jane Taylor, Little Ann and Other Poems (Routledge, 1882); Montgomerie Ranking and Thomas K. Tully, Flowers and Fancies: Valentines Ancient and Modern (M. Ward, 1882); Helen Zimmern, Tales from the Edda (Sonnenschein, 1883); (with others) Robert Ellice, compiler, Songs for the Nursery: A Collection of Children's Poems, Old and New (W. Mack, 1884); William Mavor, English Spelling Book (Routledge, 1884); John Ruskin, ed., Dame Wiggins of Lee and Her Seven Wonderful Cats (G. Allen, 1885); Bret Harte, The Queen of the Pirate Isle (Chatto & Windus, 1886); William Allingham, Rhymes for the Young Folk (Cassell, 1887); Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Routledge, 1888); Beatrice F. Cresswell, Royal Progress of King Pepito (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1889); Mary Annette Arnim, April Baby's Book of Tunes (Macmillan, 1900); Mabel H. Speilmann, Littledom Castle and Other Tales (Dutton, 1903). Contributor to various magazines, including Little Folks and Illustrated London News.

The early years of Kate Greenaway's life could not have been further removed from the idyllic depictions of childhood for which she would achieve fame. Her father John Greenaway, a respected woodcut maker and engraver, had established his own business shortly before her birth, having been offered the job of engraving plates for a series of illustrations for Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers. To avoid distracting her husband from his task, Elizabeth Greenaway took the infant Kate and her elder sister to stay with relatives in a village some 200 miles away. It was two years before they were reunited, by which time John's business was beginning to fail, forcing him to take any work he could find and to move the family into less salubrious surroundings in a new working-class district of London. The Greenaway fortunes began to improve only when Elizabeth opened a millinery shop, where, despite two further children, she proved to be an astute and capable businesswoman who became the breadwinner.

By all accounts, Kate was an imaginative and sensitive child, given to inventing games with her older sister as they played near their home along streets busy with shoppers, vendors, and colorful entertainers. Tenacious enough to save her farthing pocket-money for 24 weeks to buy a piece of furniture for her dolls' house, she could be strong willed, stubborn, and given to displays of emotion. Though she enjoyed her visits to the theater with her father, she was often unable to separate events on stage from real life, embarrassing her siblings by her unrestrained reactions. Despite life's early hardships, Kate would later write: "I had such a very happy time when I was a child, and curiously, was so very much happier than my brother and sisters, with exactly the same surroundings."

A religious and puritanical woman, Elizabeth Greenaway wanted a better life for her children and used some of the profits of her success to pay for private French and piano lessons. Kate, however, was more fascinated with her father's craft and persuaded her mother to pay for evening classes in art. Such was her talent that, at the age of 12, she was accepted as a full-time pupil in the Finsbury School of Art where she began the National Course of Art Instruction. This was a program dedicated to the production, not of fine artists or sculptors, but of men and women with the design skills to work with industry in ensuring good taste in the panoply of manufactured goods essential to the ornamentation of a Victorian home. Through a rigorously structured curriculum, the students engaged in the repetitive copying of geometric shapes and architectural features, produced clay ornaments, and painted watercolors of stuffed animals. Kate thrived on this disciplined restrictiveness, winning medals which included a national award for tile designs at the end of her six-year studies.

In 1865, Greenaway elected to continue her studies at the National Art Training School, a more fashionable center committed to the promotion of design skills above fine art training. Though her class, shyness, and general lack of glamour meant exclusion from the dominant social cliques of well-born young ladies there, Kate proceeded to win another national award, this time for a watercolor of a young boy's head. This daytime training she supplemented with evening classes in life-study at Heatherley's School of Art, one of the few progressive institutions which allowed women to study from the nude in the same room as the male students. But the heavy emphasis on individualistic style confused Kate after her years of regimented design training. She left to enroll at the Slade School of Art.

Throughout these years of study, Kate spent many vacations with her family in Rolleston Village, where the heavy influence of the English countryside, combined with her training in design, formed the basis for the popular Greenaway style. By the time her studies were completed, she had already published her first book illustration in the 1867 Infant Amusements, or How to Make a Nursery Happy and had exhibited drawings of fairies and gnomes at the Dudley Gallery in London. With sufficient commissions to establish herself as an illustrator by the early 1870s, she began to work freelance from her parents' home.

Her treatment of quaint early nineteenth-century costume, prim gardens, and the child-like spirit of her designs in an old-world atmosphere … captivated the public in a remarkable way.
—Walter Crane

The greeting-card industry had seen phenomenal growth over the previous few years as the Victorian public clamored for cards at Christmas, Valentine's Day and other holidays. Kate soon established a successful collaboration with the leading manufacturer, Ward, after her first design for a Valentine achieved sales of 25,000 within a few weeks. A shrewd instinct for popular taste led to the development of a successful style which depicted a romantic vision of children in historical dress, set against a plain background with an ornate border. From her alliance with Ward, Greenaway gained valuable experience, not just in the creation of workable, mass-market designs, but also in the business skills she would require as a young woman working alone. As workload and income increased, Kate and her father jointly rented a large house in a more sedate area where a small studio was established. Guided by him, her work began to focus upon illustrations for children's books.

In 1877, Greenaway's fortunes changed dramatically. For years, she had dreamed of illustrating a book of simple verse which she had written since childhood. Despite misgivings, John Greenaway was enchanted when he saw Kate's efforts and introduced his daughter to Edmund Evans, a printer who had achieved renown for his color publications and who was familiar with the children's book market. He had previously produced works by Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, the leading children's artists of the day. After some debate with his associate, George Routledge, Evans undertook to publish Greenaway's book, once the verses had been "tidied up" by another, more respected poet, Frederick Locker. Meanwhile Kate, by now experienced in such matters, ensured a contract of lucrative terms. Under the Window, published just in time for Christmas 1879, was an instant success. Evans' gamble in a large print run of 20,000 copies paid off when the first edition sold out within a few weeks, establishing Kate Greenaway as a household name. The commendatory reviews in fashionable journals ensured a broader purchasing market by inspiring belief in the collectability of the book and its future status as a children's classic. Within Greenaway's lifetime, over 100,000 copies were sold in English, French, and German.

The great success of Under the Window with its clean, pastel illustrations and sparse design "suggests that Kate had judged her public shrewdly," writes Rodney Engen. "Her book appealed to children as well as to fashion-struck aesthetes of the burgeoning Aesthetic Movement." With its nonsensical verse, cherubic, archaically dressed children, and evident intent to amuse, not inform, the book provided a contrast to the plethora of gaudily colored, instructive texts on the shelves. But it was not without its critics, primary amongst them Henry Stacy Marks, a renowned book illustrator, who lost no time in criticizing Greenaway's "naive defiance of all rules of composition." Kate accepted his comments humbly and in future sent him copies of her work for review.

Throughout her life, Greenaway sought the guidance and approbation of older males, beginning with her father, the primary guide for her career; the Reverend W.J. Loftie who purchased her works; Stacy Marks; and, most important of all—the art critic, John Ruskin. Though evidently capable of managing her own business relations, she often deferred to her mentors—financially secure men who did not understand the realities of life for a working woman. On many

occasions, they implored Greenaway not to work so hard, to take rests and breaks and to treat her work more like a dilettante. Yet Kate cultivated these pupil-master relationships, at the heart of which was her firmly held belief in the lower status of women. As she grew older, she became exasperated by the women's suffrage movement—"I don't want a vote myself.… For my part I do feel the men can do it better and so hope it may remain," she wrote. Almost more infuriating was the idea of being classed a "lady artist"—a group whose ranks she refused to join when an exhibition of women's art was held to mark "Victoria year," 1897. She wrote to a friend, "Now why can't we just take our places fairly—get just our right amount of credit and no more. Of course we shouldn't get the first places—for the very simple and just reason—that we don't deserve them."

It was Stacy Marks who provided an introduction to Ruskin, whose critical voice continued to wield great power, even though he was now in self-imposed semi-retirement. From his house in the picturesque Lake District, Ruskin managed an incredible number of epistolary relationships, mainly with unattached women, upon whom he lavished his advice and guidance in tones ranging from the paternal to the overtly flirtatious. In January 1880, Greenaway became a new beneficiary of his patronism when she received a gushingly appreciative letter, thus beginning the association which would dominate her life. With her burgeoning fame, she was swept into a different world from the beginning of the decade, finding herself at dinners with such literary greats as Robert Browning, or artists like Edward Burne-Jones, as she was inundated with requests for her presence at society events. The publication of Kate Greenaway's Birthday Book in the autumn of 1880 reassured her position as a leading illustrator when sales reflected its critical and popular acclaim.

But Kate was soon to experience the less enjoyable effect of fame: imitation. By the early 1880s, the shop windows were full of plagiarized Greenaway children, often engaged in activities—like pipe-smoking—which would curl the hair of their angelic prototypes. "It feels so

queer, somehow, to see your ideas taken by someone else and put forth as theirs," wrote Kate to a friend. The loose, light Regency costumes of her figures provided a refreshing contrast to current, formal fashions, and this inspired another market. In England and in France, fashionable types began to dress their offspring "a la mode Greenaway," a vogue which continued into the 20th century. But the supreme accolade and acknowledgment of her fame came with the invitation, in 1881, to bring her sketchbook to Buckingham Palace, where she entertained the young princes and princesses with her skills.

Mother Goose, or the Old Nursery Rhymes, published at Christmas of that year, signified the first small decline in Greenaway's popularity. Evans' haste to ensure that the book would arrive on time for the holiday, coupled with Kate's lack of control over the production of her work, resulted in poorly printed copies. And though the press received the book with enthusiasm, Greenaway and her mentor, Locker, were disappointed by the results. A Day in a Child's Life, a book of piano music, bordered by Greenaway illustrations, was less well received. "Miss Greenaway seems to be lapsing into a rather lackadaisical prettiness of style. Her little people are somewhat deficient in vitality" was the response of The Times.

The relationship with Ruskin was by now Greenaway's primary obsession outside of her work. With only infrequent meetings, he insinuated himself as her dominant critic through a voluminous correspondence. Kate wrote to him almost daily from the notepad she kept on her desk to jot down thoughts or observations she believed would interest or amuse him. Ruskin, in return, became one of her keenest champions. He went so far as to claim, in an 1883 lecture at Oxford, that she was one of the great artists of all time who could be a savior from the prevailing industrial grimness. In private, he encouraged Kate to return to drawing from nature, suggesting that she improve her technique with drawings of her "girlies" without their Greenaway garb. Undoubtedly Kate's devotion was inspired by romance—the only such attachment of her life. Ruskin solicited her affections with demands for "love letters" and the instigation of postal "kissing games." But this was to be the extent of Kate's romantic life—she never married and had no other suitors.

From 1883 to 1897, with the exception of one year, the Kate Greenaway Almanack became an institution with collectors and the general public alike. American sales had now expanded, French and German copies were immediately available, and Kate's publishers continued to capitalize on her widespread popularity. By the end of 1884, her early card designs had been reissued in the Baby's Birthday Book, the Kate Greenaway Painting Book had been published using earlier illustrations, and her new works, The Language of Flowers and The English Spelling Book, were on the shelves. A move to a house on the edge of Hampstead Heath brought new financial burdens for Greenaway, by now the breadwinner of the family. Her brother described her monotonous routine of work: long days spent alone in her studio, struggling for the inspiration to produce original ideas for her latest projects. By now, Kate was becoming disillusioned with her role as illustrator, depressed by the imitations she saw everywhere, and keen to move onto other work. The Marigold Garden, a book of her own verse, and illustrations inspired by Gainsborough, took nearly two years of her time, and was published in 1885. The book was not a commercial success, and the lukewarm reception of the following year's Almanack were evidence that her career was in decline.

Allingham, Helen Patterson (1848–1926)

English watercolorist and illustrator. Born Helen Patterson on September 26, 1848; died at Haslemere in 1926; daughter of A.H. Paterson (a doctor); attended the Birmingham School of Design and the Royal Academy Schools; married William Allingham (the Irish poet), in 1874.

Influenced by the work of Fred Walker, Helen Allingham devoted her illustrations to domestic and rural life. She achieved her first success at age 26 by illustrating the serialization of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd for The Cornhill Magazine (1874). A rarity among woman artists in Victorian England, Allingham was extremely popular and was frequently given one-woman shows by the Fine Art Society in the 1880s and 1890s. She also illustrated books of Juliana Horatia Ewing , including A Flat Iron for a Farthing (1872) and Jan of the Windmill (1876). Her Angelika Kauffmann in the Studio of Joshua Reynolds was painted in 1875.