Kate Greenaway, otherwise known as Catherine Greenaway, was born in Hoxton, London, England, on 17th March, 1846.
She is world-renowned as one of the best ‘Golden Age Illustrators‘, and brought a new lease of life to turn-of-the-century children’s illustration.
Greenaway studied at what is now the Royal College of Art in London, which at that time had a separate section for women, and was headed by Richard Burchett. Her first book, Under the Window: Pictures & Rhymes for Children (1879), a collection of simple, perfectly idyllic verses about children, was a best-seller.
In the late 1870s, Greenaway – who had heretofore been illustrating greeting cards – persuaded her father, who was also in the engraving business, to show Edmund Evans her manuscript, Under the Window. This was to be the start of an illustrious career. The book sold over 100,000 copies, and started what became known as the “Greenaway Vogue”.
Although Greenaway illustrated over 150 books, Under the Window is one of the only two books that she both wrote and illustrated, the other being Marigold Garden, or the Language of Flowers (1885).
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, Greenaway’s only rivals in popularity in children’s book illustration were Walter Crane , Jessie Willcox Smith and Randolph Caldecott. Her style was truly unique however, and brought such well known stories to life as Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Elizabeth von Arnim’s April Baby’s Book of Tunes, the classic old-nursery-rhymes of Mother Goose and Bret Harte’s The Queen of the Pirate Isle.
“Kate Greenaway” children, all of them little girls and boys too young to be put in trousers, according to the conventions of the time, were dressed in her own versions of late-eighteenth century and Regency fashions: smock-frocks and skeleton suits for boys, high-waisted pinafores and dresses with mobcaps and straw bonnets for girls.
By the late-nineteenth century, “Greenaway Children” were so ubiquitous, that Liberty of London adapted Kate Greenaway’s drawings as designs for actual children’s clothes.
Greenaway’s success was officially recognised in 1889, when she was elected to membership of the ‘Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours’.
(source: https://www.pookpress.co.uk/project/kate-greenaway-biography/)