Catherine Greenaway (17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901) was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations.

In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer Edmund Evans printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation.

[1][2] According to children's literature scholar Humphrey Carpenter, the period was to Greenaway "crucial ... she felt it to be her real home, a country of the mind that she could always reimagine".

[3] The family lived in the flat above the shop,[4] and young Kate, often left to her own devices to explore,[3] spent many hours in the enclosed courtyard garden, later writing about it in her unfinished autobiography as a place filled with "richness of colour and depth of shade.

[5] As a young child Greenaway's parents taught her at home; later she was sent to various dame schools;[2] she was an avid reader of chapbook versions of fairy tales – her favourites were "Sleeping Beauty", "Cinderella", and "Beauty and the Beast" – as well as illustrated editions of Shakespeare, writing later that children "often don’t care a bit about the books people think they will and I think they often like grown-up books – at least I did.

The curriculum, devised by Henry Cole, was meant to train artisans in designing decorative wallpaper, tiles, and carpets.

[7] The headmaster at the Royal Female School of Art was Richard Burchett, whom Elizabeth Thompson described as a "bearded, velvet-skull-capped and cold-searching-eyed man.

At this point she was allowed to draw human figures, at first from plaster casts and then from models dressed in historical or ornamental costumes, skills she applied during the summers in Rolleston.

[6] Determined to break from Henry Cole's rigid curriculum, he exhorted students to become more expressive and creative, concepts alien to Greenaway whose long early years of training consisted solely of copying and work with geometric designs.

To gain a better understanding of the colour process, she made frequent visits to the National Gallery,[12] where she studied masters such as Jan van Eyck, whose Arnolfini Portrait she especially liked.

[18] She lived in an Arts and Crafts style house she commissioned from Richard Norman Shaw in Frognal, London, although she spent summers in Rolleston.

Greenaway's paintings were reproduced by chromoxylography, by which the colours were printed from hand-engraved wood blocks by the firm of Edmund Evans.

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 Kate Greenaway Medal, established in her honour in 1955, is awarded annually by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK to an illustrator of children's books.