Art: New Country

A century ago this month, a London engraver’s daughter named Kate Greenaway opened her eyes on the world. She soon found it good. Her adult life was a grey, lonely history of work, but she never quite lost the sunlight that filled her head when she was small. Wrote she at 50: “You can go into a beautiful new country if you stand under a large apple tree and look up to the blue sky through the white flowers. . . . I suppose I went to it very young before I could really remember and that is why I have such a wild delight in cowslips and apple blossom—they always give me the same strange feeling of trying to remember, as if I had known them in a former world.”

Last week, in exhibitions and displays from New York to San Francisco, children and grownups were visiting the beautiful “new country”—immortalized in her picture books (Under the Window, Marigold Garden, A-Apple Pie, The Pied Piper of Hamlin, Kate Greenaway’s Alphabet).

Her books had such a vogue in the ’80s that Paris invented a word for it, Greenawisme. Chintz curtains were printed with Greenaway’s interpretations of the seasons (a blizzard for January, flowers for June). Greenaway’s grave little girls, in long frocks and wide sashes, and her good little boys, in pork pie hats, were painted on dinner sets, turned into salt & pepper shakers; oil lamps were embossed with Greenaway designs; valentines like those from Greenaway’s Quiver of Love were de rigueur for little lovers. Samples of these were on display in the Chicago Public Library.

Kate Greenaway owes much of her fame to Color-Printer Edmund Evans, who discovered and sponsored her, and engraved her drawings. Another of Evans’ discoveries was Randolph Caldecott, born in 1846, whose centenary was also celebrated last week. Kate Greenaway envied Caldecott’s wit. Most illustrators were more inclined to envy Caldecott’s sure sense of movement, which set a new standard for fast action on paper. His books (John Gilpin’s Ride, Three Jovial Huntsmen, etc.) were as boyish and gay as Greenaway’s were girlish and sweet.