Kate Greenaway Pictures from Originals Presented by Her to John Ruskin and Other Personal Friends (hitherto unpublished)

11+[20 unnumbered illustrations] pages with frontispiece and illustrations with titled tissue guards. Folio (11 1/2" x 10") bound in original quarter beige cloth with green lettering to spine with gilt and green lettering to cover and remnants of jacket. With an appreciation by H M Cundall. First edition.

Catherine "Kate" Greenaway (17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901) was an English children's book illustrator and writer. Her drawings gave rise to a fashion in young children's clothing in the 1880s and 1890s. Greenaway spent much of her childhood at Rolleston, Nottinghamshire. She studied at what is now the Royal College of Art in London, in the section for women. (The college was then headed by Richard Burchett.) Her first book, Under the Window(1879), a collection of simple, perfectly idyllic verses about children, was a bestseller. Greenaway's paintings were reproduced by chromoxylography, by which the colors 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 were Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott. "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. The influence of children's clothes in portraits by British painter John Hoppner (1758–1810) may have provided her some inspiration. 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 daughters in Kate Greenaway pantaloons and bonnets in the 1880s and 1890s. The style was often used by painter Maude Goodman in her depictions of children. Greenaway was elected to membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colors in 1889. She lived in an Arts and Crafts style house she commissioned from Richard Norman Shaw in Frognal, London, although she spent summers in Rolleston (Wikipedia).

Condition:

Front heal corner bumped and rubbed through. Jacket front panel and fold over left the rest lacking else a very good copy in a partial jacket.