Kate Greenaway

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May Day by Kate Greenaway.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin, illustrated by Kate Greenaway

Kate Greenaway (Catherine Greenaway) (London, March 17, 1846 - November 6, 1901) was a 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.

The Kate Greenaway Medal is awarded annually by the UK Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals to an illustrator of children's books.

New techniques of photolithography enabled her delicate watercolors to be reproduced. Through the 1880s and 90s, in popularity her only rivals in the field of children's book illustration were Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, himself also the eponym of a highly-regarded prize medal. '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 that 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.

She lived in an arts and crafts house she commissioned from Richard Norman Shaw in Frognal, London, although she also spent summers in the small Nottinghamshire village of Rolleston, near Southwell.

She died due to breast cancer.