Kate Greenaway RWS (1846-1901)

     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. It can be a little hard for the modern eye to adjust to this, because we are
bombarded with so much third-rate stuff of this nature, but Greenaway's pictures are
by far the best of the genre, and her simple compositions are very carefully studied.

     Kate Greenaway was the daughter of John Greenaway, a wood-engraver for
Punch and the Illustrated London News. She studied at South Kensington, London,
England, where she befriended the painter Lady Butler, and then at the Slade under
Alphonse Legros. 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 the works of both
Crane and Caldecott.

     Greenaway's style was to draw in watercolour, and successfully transferring her
drawings to the woodblock was costly. However, the illustrations she produced were
enormously popular and she became rich, able to have a specially designed house
built for her in a posh part of Hampstead (now in Greater London), where she took
up residence in 1885. 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, on which occasion Lord Leighton
bought a couple of drawings. Greenaway became a good friend of John Ruskin,
maintaining a long correspondence with him.

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 From "A Apple Pie", 1886
  A Apple Pie