1. Catherine Greenaway was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations.
24 Facts About Kate Greenaway
1. 2.
Kate Greenaway received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art.
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Kate Greenaway began her career designing for the burgeoning greetings card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards.
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Kate Greenaway was born in Hoxton, London, the second of four children, to a working-class family.
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Kate Greenaway's mother, Elizabeth, was a dress maker and her father, John, an engraver who gave up steady employment with Ebenezer Landells' engraving firm to strike out on his own.
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When Kate Greenaway was very young, he accepted a commission to provide the engraved illustrations to a new edition of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, sending his young family away to relatives in the countryside to give himself solitude while producing the engravings.
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The publisher who commissioned John Kate Greenaway's work went bankrupt, leaving the family without an income.
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When Elizabeth Kate Greenaway returned from Rolleston with the children, the family moved to Islington, where she opened a children's dress shop that attracted well-to-do clients.
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John Kate Greenaway provided for his mother and two sisters as well as for his own family.
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Kate Greenaway took piecemeal engraving jobs, usually for weekly publications, such as The Illustrated London News.
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Kate Greenaway frequently worked on the wood carving throughout the night in front of the fire.
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Kate Greenaway enjoyed watching him, and through his work was exposed to illustrations by John Leech, John Gilbert, and Kenny Meadows.
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Kate Greenaway struggled at Heatherley and was frustrated that women were segregated from men in the life class.
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Kate Greenaway's reputation was built on the awards she had won while completing the National Art Courses, and buttressed with early exhibitions.
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Kate Greenaway exhibited a set of fairy watercolours in 1868, which she sold to W J Loftie, publisher of People's Magazine.
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Kate Greenaway set them to verse and printed them in his magazine.
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Kate Greenaway was aware that the work she produced was overly gaudy, in part because she lacked technical knowledge of the Chromoxylography process.
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Kate Greenaway's first book, Under the Window, a collection of simple, perfectly idyllic verses about children, was a bestseller.
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Kate Greenaway was elected to membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1889.
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Kate Greenaway exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.
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Kate Greenaway lived in an Arts and Crafts style house she commissioned from Richard Norman Shaw in Frognal, London, although she spent summers in Rolleston.
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Kate Greenaway died of breast cancer in 1901, at the age of 55.
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Kate Greenaway's paintings were reproduced by chromoxylography, by which the colours were printed from hand-engraved wood blocks by the firm of Edmund Evans.
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The Kate Greenaway Medal, established in her honour in 1955, is awarded annually by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK to an illustrator of children's books.