Prof. Francesco Carelli

 

Marigold Garden (1876), a collection of simple,
perfectly idyllic verses about children, was a bestseller

 

Catherine Greenaway (1846 – 1901) was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children’s book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871. She began her career designing for the burgeoning greetings card market, producing Christmas and Valentine’s cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer Edmund Evans printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evans continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
The depictions of children in imaginary 18th-century costumes in a Queen Anne style were extremely popular in England and internationally, sparking the Kate Greenaway style. She was aware that the work she produced was overly gaudy, in part because she lacked technical knowledge of the Chromoxylography process. To gain a better understanding of the colour process, she made frequent visits to the National Gallery, where she studied masters.
In the 1880s, the most popular designers of bookplates were Greenaway, along with Crane and Aubrey Beardsley. Their work exhibited intricate art nouveau elements with flowing vines and floral patterns.

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 was Walter Crane. “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. 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 children in Kate Greenaway pantaloons and bonnets in the 1880s and 1890s.