Kate Greenaway

Welcome to the world of Kate Greenaway!

Kate Greenaway (Catherine Greenaway) (London, 17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901) was an English children’s book illustrator and writer. Her first book, Under The Window (1879), a collection of simple, perfectly idyllic verses concerning children who endlessly gathered posies, untouched by the Industrial Revolution, was a best-seller.

“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. The influence of children’s clothes in portraits by British painter John Hoppner (1758-1810) may have provided her some inspiration. Liberty’s 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 daughters in Kate Greenaway pantaloons and bonnets in the 1880s and ’90s.