THE ARTIST: A REVIEW AND AN ESTIMATE

In order to judge of Kate Greenaway as an artist, and appraise her true place and position in British art, we must bear in mind not only what she did, but what she was. It must be remembered that she was a pioneer, an inventor, an innovator; and that, although she painted no great pictures and challenged no comparison with those who labour in the more elevated planes of artistry, is sufficient to place her high upon the roll. Just as Blake is most highly valued for his illustration and Cruikshank and Goya for their etched plates, rather than for their pictures, so Kate Greenaway must be judged, not by the dignity of her materials, or by the area of her canvas, but by the originality of her genius, and by the strength and depth of the impression she has stamped on the mind and sentiment of the world. As Mr. Holman Hunt, Millais, and their associates invigorated the art of England by their foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, so Kate Greenaway introduced a Pre-Raphaelite spirit into the art of the nursery. That is what Dr. Max Nordau, with curious perversion of judgment and lack of appreciation, denounced as ‘degeneracy’!—accusing her of creating ‘a false and degenerate race of children in art,’ while at the worst she was but giving us a Midsummer Day’s Dream in Modern England. For him Kate Greenaway, the healthy, sincere, laughter-loving artist, is a ‘decadent’ such as vexes the soul of a Tolstoi. It is the result, of course, of misapprehension—of a misunderstanding which has revolted few besides him.

The outstanding merit of Kate Greenaway’s work is its obvious freedom from affectation, its true and unadulterated English character. What Dr. Nordau mistook for affectation is simply humour—a quaintness which is not less sincere and honest for being sometimes sufficiently self-conscious to make and enjoy and sustain the fun. Such grace of action, such invariable delicacy and perfect taste of her little pictures, belong only to a mind of the sweetest order—the spontaneity and style, only to an artist of the rarest instinct. Animated by a love of the world’s beauty that was almost painful in its intensity, she was not satisfied to render merely what she saw; she was compelled to colour it with fancy and imagination. She reveals this passion in a letter to Mr. Locker-Lampson:—

Kate Greenaway to F. Locker-Lampson

The truth is, her poetic emotion and the imagination which so stirred the admiration of Ruskin and the rest, inspired her to express a somewhat fanciful vision of the flowers, and children, and life which she saw around her. She gave us not what she saw, but what she felt, even as she looked. Her subtle and tender observation, one writer has declared, was corrected and modified by her own sense of love and beauty. Her instinctive feeling is, therefore, nobler than her sense of record; it is big in ‘conception’ and style, and is immeasurably more delightful than bare appreciation of fact.

It is a touch of tragedy in Kate Greenaway’s life, that she to whom the love of children was as the very breath of her life was never herself to be thrilled by that maternal love for the little ones she adored. Still ‘her spirit was bright and pure, vivacious and alert,’ so that she drew children with the grace of Stothard and the naturalness of Reynolds, investing them with all the purity and brightness that we find in her drawing and her colour. Although her cantata was simple, it was ever notable for its exquisite harmony and perfect instrumentation.

Faults, no doubt, of a technical sort Kate Greenaway shows in many of her drawings, and, as we have seen, mannerisms at times betrayed her. She would exaggerate in her faces the pointed chin that was a charm of her model Gertie’s face. She would draw eyes too far apart, as Ford Madox Brown came to do; yet how exquisitely those eyes were drawn, and how admirably placed within their sockets! perfect in accuracy of touch, and delightful in their beauty. The knees of her girls are sometimes too low down; the draperies are often too little studied and lack grace of line; her babies’ feet are at times too large, and are carelessly drawn, or at least are rendered without sufficient appreciation of their form. A score of drawings substantiate every one of these charges—but what of that? The greatest artists have had their failings, cardinal in academic eyes, for the faults are all of technique. As Boughton exclaimed of his friend George du Maurier—‘I respect him for his merits, but I love him for his faults.’ In Kate Greenaway’s case her faults are forgotten, or at least forgiven, in presence of her refined line and fairy tinting, her profiles and full faces of tender loveliness, and her figures of daintiest grace.

The appreciation of Kate Greenaway’s work was universal. In France its reception was always enthusiastic, and the critics expressed their delight with characteristic felicity. They recognised, said one,[80] that until Kate Greenaway there had been no author and artist for the boy citizens whose trousers are always too short, and for the girl citizens whose hands are always too red. They knew nothing about her personality, and even doubted whether her name was not a pseudonym; but they welcomed in her the children’s artist par excellence, who knew that the spirit, the intelligence, the soul of little ones are unlike those of adults, and who knew, too, by just how much they differed. At the end of a glowing tribute M. ArsÈne Alexandre spoke of her as having been naturalisÉe de Paris—alluding, of course, not to herself but to her work,—whereupon an important English newspaper mistranslated the expression; and so arose the absurd report circulated after her death, that Kate Greenaway, who had never quitted the shores of England, had passed the later years of her life in Paris.

From Paris, declared La Vie de Paris, ‘the graceful mode of Greenawisme has gained the provinces, and from wealthy quarters has penetrated into the suburbs’;[81] and the Vienna Neue Freie Presse maintained that ‘Kate Greenaway has raised a lasting monument to herself in the reform of children’s dress, for which we have to thank her.’ But the Figaro and the Temps recognised her higher achievement. ‘Kate Greenaway,’ said the former, ‘had une Âme exquise. She translated childhood into a divine language—or perhaps, if you prefer it, she translated the divine mystery of childhood into a purely and exquisitely child-like tongue.’ ‘Never,’ said the latter, ‘has a sweeter soul interpreted infancy and childhood with more felicity, and I know nothing so touching in their naÏvetÉ as the child-scenes that illustrate so many of the artist’s books, the very first of which made her celebrated.’ These are but specimens of the scores of tributes that filled the press of Europe and America at the time of Kate Greenaway’s death, and are sufficient to prove the international appeal she made, triumphing over the differences of race, fashion, and custom which usually are an insuperable bar to universal appreciation.

Original as she was in her view of art and in the execution of her ideas, Kate Greenaway was very impressionable and frequently suffered herself to be influenced by other artists. But that she was unconscious of the fact seems unquestionable, and that her own strong individuality saved her from anything that could be called imitation must be admitted. The nearest semblance to that plagiarism which she so heartily abhorred is to be found in the likeness borne by some of her landscapes to those of Mrs. Allingham. The circumstance, as already recounted, that the two ladies were cordial friends and went out sketching together, the younger student in landscape-drawing watching her companion’s methods, is sufficient explanation of the likeness. Miss Greenaway quickly recognised the peril; and she must have realised that her drawings, so produced, lacked much of the spontaneity, the sparkle, and the mellowness of the work of Mrs. Allingham. Take, for example, the charming plate called ‘A Surrey Cottage.’[82] The landscape is as thoroughly understood as the picturesque element of the design, with its well-drawn trees and deftly-rendered grass. The children form a pretty group; but they are not a portion of the picture; they are dropped into the design and clearly do not fit the setting into which they are so obviously placed. The artist herself has clearly felt the defect, and obviated it on other occasions. The love of red Surrey cottages, green fields, and groups of little children was common to both artists, and Kate’s imitation is more apparent than real; her renderings of them are honest and tender, full of sentiment, and of accurate, vigorous observation. She does not seem to have studied landscape for its breadth, or sought to read and transcribe the mighty message of poetry it holds for every whole-hearted worshipper. Rather did she seek for the passages of beauty and the pretty scenes which appealed to her, delighting in the sonnet, as it were, rather than in the epic.

Her shortness of sight handicapped her sadly in this branch of art, and prevented her from seeing many facts of nature in a broad way; for example, while ‘The Old Farm House’ has great merits of breeziness, truth, and transparency of colour, with a sense of ‘out-of-doorness’ not often so freshly and easily obtained, the great tree at the back lacks substance, as well as shadow and mystery, for its branches are spread out like a fan, and do not seem, any of them, to grow towards the spectator. There is no such fault in ‘The Stick Fire’—a subject curiously recalling Fred Walker; for here the landscape, although a little empty, is clearly studied from nature and set down with great reticence and intelligence. And what could be prettier than the pose of the two girls, big and little, on the left? When she leaves realism and touches the landscapes and groups with her own inimitable convention, Miss Greenaway becomes truly herself and can be compared with none other. Glance, for instance, at ‘The Bracken Gatherers.’ It has the sense of style and ‘bigness’ which triumphs over any mannerism; and the heads, especially that of the girl set so well upon her neck, are so full of dignity that they may be considered a serious effort in art.

She was undoubtedly influenced at times by Mrs. Allingham and Fred Walker, as well as by Ford Madox Brown (see ‘Brother and Sister,’ in which the little girl might almost have come from his pencil). We find traces, too, of Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A. (in ‘Strawberries’—a drawing not here reproduced), of Stothard (as in the masterly sketch for ‘The May Dance’ with its fine sense of grace and movement, and its excellent spacing), of Downman (as in the portraits belonging to the Hon. Gerald Ponsonby), of Richard Doyle (as in the large drawing of ‘The Elf Ring’), and sometimes we recognise echoes of Stacy Marks, of Mason, and of Calvert. But what does it all amount to? Merely this, that when she wandered beyond the garden of that Greenawayland which she had called into being, the artist was sometimes moved by the emotions with which she had been thrilled when in past years she gazed with enthusiasm at these men’s work. The resemblance was in the main accidental; for every one of these painters, like herself, is characteristically and peculiarly English in his view of art as in his methods of execution.

There are those who sneer at nationality in art. You can no more speak of English art, laughed Whistler, than you can speak of English mathematics. The analogy is entirely a false one. You can say with truth ‘English art’ as you can say ‘German music’; for although art in its language is universal, in its expression it is national, or at least racial; and it is the merit of a nation to express itself frankly in its art in its own natural way, and to despise the affectation of self-presentation in the terms and in the guise of foreign practice not native to itself. It is a matter of sincerity and, moreover, of good sense; for little respect is deserved or received by a man who affects to speak his language with a foreign accent. Kate Greenaway was intensely and unfeignedly English: for that she is beloved in her own country, and for that she is appreciated and respected abroad. Like Hogarth, Reynolds, and Millais, she was the unadulterated product of England, and like them she gave us of her ‘English art.’

In the latter part of her career Kate Greenaway modified her manner of water-colour painting, mainly with the view to obtaining novelty of effect and conquering public approval. At the beginning she had tried to make finished pictures, as we see in the moonlight scene of ‘The Elf Ring.’ Then when she discovered her true mÉtier, influenced by the requirements of Mr. Edmund Evans’s wood-block printing, to which she adapted herself with consummate ease, she used outline in pen or pencil, with delicate washes in colour: these drawings were made in every case, of course, for publication in books. Their ready independent sale encouraged her to elaborate her little pictures, and her election as Member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours confirmed her in the decision to turn her attention to pure water-colour painting. The decreasing demand for book-illustration influenced her somewhat in taking the new work very seriously, encouraged thereto by Ruskin, who, as we have seen, was forever crying out for ‘a bit of Nature.’ So she painted landscapes which, in point of technique, lacked some of the accidental grace and freshness and serious depth which should be essential to such work, although they were rich in her own sentimental and tender way of seeing things. Then in figure painting she abandoned her outlines and indulged in the full strong colour which Ruskin always begged from her. That she should have fused this vigour of coloration with her own native faculty for daintiness—as for example in ‘Lucy Locket’—must be accounted to her credit.

Later on her colour became more subdued and even silvery. We see it in the little idyll, so pure in drawing and feeling, ‘Two at a Stile’ (with its curious contrast of exact full face in the girl and exact profile in her swain), and still more in the tender and prettily imagined ‘Sisters,’ wherein even the red flowers, although they lend warmth to the almost colourless composition, do not tell as a spot, so knowingly is the strength restrained. Indeed, charm and delicacy rather than strength are characteristic of Kate Greenaway’s genius. We see them, for example, in the little ‘Swansdown’ and companion drawings here reproduced full size, and we see them also in the playful ‘Calm in a Teacup,’ and in ‘Mary had a Little Lamb,’ which the artist drew as a Christmas card for Professor Ruskin, with their delicate touches of colour and the exquisite pencil outline—so unhesitating and firm nevertheless, that, despite their simplicity, they rarely fail to realise the exact degree of beauty or of character intended.

Her colour indeed was almost invariably happy, exactly suited to the matter in hand. In the early days of her first valentines it was crude enough, and chrome yellow, rose madder, cobalt blue, and raw umber seemed to satisfy her. But soon her eye became extraordinarily sensitive, and whether strong or delicate the scheme of colour was always harmonious. A test drawing is to be found in ‘A Baby in White,’ wherein the little personage so well fills the page. This is in fact a study in whites—in the dress, the daisies, and the blossoms—of such variety that the artist’s judgment and ability are absolutely vindicated. Not that Kate Greenaway always painted her white blossoms, or, for the matter of that, left the white paper to represent them. She became skilled in the use of the knife, and used the artifice consecrated and made legitimate by such masters as Turner and William Hunt, with great dexterity. In ‘The Girl and her Milk Pail’—which breathes so pleasantly the memory of Pinwell, and which, well composed and drawn, shows greater regard than usual for the virtue of atmosphere—the blossoms on the branch above the wall are all produced by ‘knifing’: that is to say, by means of a sharp knife a bit of the paper’s surface of the exact shape required is sliced into and turned over when not cut off; and the effect is more vivid and true than any amount of care or paint could otherwise secure.

Except for this, Miss Greenaway used no tricks: she neither ‘rubbed,’ nor ‘scratched,’ nor ‘washed.’ It is perhaps fairer to say that she was too honest than that she lacked resource. She always maintained the legitimacy of the use of body-colour, which some purists profess to abhor; beyond that her work is quite simple and direct, while her technical skill is amply efficacious for all she had to do.

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In the matter of models, whether for illustrations or exhibition drawings, she was particular and fastidious. At all times she preferred to draw from the life. Her studies from the nude—made in her youth, with such conscientious accuracy that every form, every fold in the skin, and every undulation of high light and shadow, were rendered with the firmness and with ease that come of practice, knowledge, and skill—had carried her far enough for the model to be reckoned a servant, and not a master. But a realistic drawing is one thing, and a simplified archaistic rendering of a living figure quite another; and we may take it, broadly, that difficulty in figure draughtsmanship increases in direct ratio to the degree of its simplification. With anatomy, we imagine, she was less familiar.

Miss Greenaway selected her models with much care. For her men, as has already been said, her father and brother usually would good-naturedly sit, and the type of old lady she often adopted was based upon Mrs. Greenaway. As for her children, the list of those who were pressed into the service is tolerably long. Some of her models she would secure by visiting schools and selecting likely children, and these again would recommend others. Some were already professional models themselves, or were children brought to her by such. The first of all was the ‘water-cress girl’ who was employed for her earliest work for the publishers. ‘Mary,’ who was secured after the publication of Under the Window, appears in all the books up to the Pied Piper. She belonged to a family of models, and coming to Miss Greenaway when a little girl, remained in her service until she was grown up. And years later another ‘Mary’ succeeded her. ‘Adela’ and her sister were the earliest models of whom any record exists, and they were employed for Under the Window, for which Miss Greenaway’s nephew Eddie also sat. He, indeed, is to be found in the whole series up to and including the Pied Piper, that is to say in the Birthday Book, Mother Goose, A Day in a Child’s Life, Little Ann, Language of Flowers, Marigold Garden, and A Apple Pie. Mary’s brother ‘Alfred’ sat, along with his sister, for the same books as she did; and ‘Gertie’ is to be recognised mainly in Little Ann and the Language of Flowers. Gertie became a figure in the Greenaway household; as, from the position of a model merely, she afterwards graduated to the rank of housemaid at Frognal, where, when she opened the street door, visitors were surprised and edified to recognise in her a typical ‘Kate Greenaway girl,’ with reddish hair and pointed chin, as pretty and artless a creature as if she had walked straight out of a Greenaway toy-book. If the reader would see a characteristic portrait of her, he will find one on p. 24 of the Language of Flowers, and better still, perhaps, in ‘Willy and his Sister’ on p. 30 of Marigold Garden. Then there were ‘Freddie’ and his sisters, and Mrs. Webb’s children, and ‘Isa,’ ‘Ruby,’ the Gilchrists, two sisters, and a little red-haired girl (name forgotten): nearly all of whom were known only by their Christian names, so that their identity must remain unknown to fame. These were the most constant models—these, and the ‘little Mary’ to whom she frequently alludes in her letters to Ruskin.

That the little ones were a constant tribulation to the artist, whose patience was often put to the severest test, her letters to friends bear frequent witness. For example, to Mr. Locker-Lampson she writes from Pemberton Gardens:—

Kate Greenaway to Frederick Locker-Lampson

And in a lively letter to Mrs. Severn she sends a verbatim report of the bright but discursive dialogue between the ‘Chatter-box Mary’ and ‘Victim’ (herself), illustrated with fifteen sketches of Mary’s feet in constantly changing postures, driving the artist to distraction and culminating in ‘VICTIM—limp—worn—exhausted.’

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In the class of drawings which she called ‘Processions’ Miss Greenaway is entirely original. She could arrange a dozen, or if need be twenty, figures—usually of graceful girls and pretty babes—full of movement and action, in which there is cheerfully worked-out a decorative motif, with a rhythmic line running through the composition. In some the work is so delicate as practically to defy satisfactory reproduction; but sufficient justice can be done to suggest their charm of sentiment and the balance of design. Now and again we have in miniature a reminder of the languorous dignity of Leighton’s ‘Daphnephoria.’ Sometimes the movement is more lively, and we have ‘Dances’ of all kinds, now quaint and strangely demure, now full of the joy of life. ‘The May Dance’ is as sober as if it were designed for a panel in a public building; but in ‘The Dancing of the Felspar Fairies’ we have a vigorous abandon mingled with the conventionality of graceful poses. In most of them, no doubt, the draperies are seldom studied accurately from life; but it is doubtful whether, if they were more correct in their flow of fold, they would harmonise so well with the character of the figures and general treatment. For throughout, it must be observed, she is a decorative artist. Even in the delightful realism of her flowers, which have rarely been surpassed either in sympathy of understanding or in delicacy and refinement of realisation, she never forgets their decorative value: they are presented to us not for their inherent beauty alone, but for their value upon the paper or upon the decorated page.

For that reason, perhaps, Kate Greenaway was never quite at home as a portraitist: she resented being tied down to a face or figure. No doubt, such drawings as ‘The Red Boy’ and ‘The Little Model’ were portraits, but she was free to depart from the truth as much as she chose. The children in the unfinished oil-paintings of ‘The Muff’ and ‘Alfy’ were not less portraits, but the motive of these oil pictures (of the size of life) was not likeness merely but practice in what Ruskin called ‘the sticky art.’ In ‘Vera Samuel’ an unaccountable width has been given to the head, but without loss of character. There appears more truth in the portrait of ‘Frederick Locker-Lampson’ with eyelids drooping, an interesting likeness of an interesting man of letters; the woolliness of effect being mainly due to the translation of stippled water-colour into black-and-white. The head of old ‘Thomas Chappell’ is one of the artist’s masterpieces in portraiture—full of character and insight, and a really brilliant rendering of old age, firmly drawn and elaborately modelled. With the pencil Kate Greenaway was more at home. The rapid unfinished sketch of her brother, ‘John Greenaway, Jr.,’ is still a likeness although more than thirty years have passed since it was made; and the two delightfully executed heads of ‘Miss Mabel Ponsonby’ and ‘Miss Eileen Ponsonby,’ reinforced with faint colour in the manner of Downman, and with not a little of his delicacy, imply a measure of accomplishment attained by constant practice—the result, perhaps, of South Kensington training. The ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ in a method somewhat similar, is not entirely successful as a portrait; but it is included here as an example of the new style of work which Miss Greenaway adopted towards the end of her career. Perhaps the most engaging of all is the miniature of ‘Joan Ponsonby,’ in which we find an artless simplicity, a candour and refreshing naturalness, wholly apart and distinct from the photographically inspired miniature of to-day. The colours are simple and the handling broad for all its precision of drawing, for the artist has resisted the temptation to finish her flowers and other details with the microscopical minuteness which she employed with so much effect on more suitable occasions.

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When all Miss Greenaway’s work is carefully judged, it will, we think, be seen that it is with the point rather than with the brush that she touches her highest level, whether her manner be precise as in her book-plates, or free as in her sketches. Of her book-plates, the best are unquestionably those of Mr. Locker-Lampson and Lady Victoria Herbert. The latter is formal in treatment and beautifully grouped, yet drawn with a certain hardness typical of what is called the Birmingham School; the former infinitely more sympathetic in touch, the children delightful in pose, the apple-tree drawn with unusual perfection, and the distant city touched in with extraordinary skill. With these, compare the masterly pencil study of a baby toddling forwards—swiftly drawn, loosely handled, instinct with life and character, one of the best things, artistically considered, the artist ever did. Hardly less remarkable is the tiny sketch in a letter to Ruskin of a little bonneted girl holding up her skirt as she walks—a drawing not unworthy of Charles Keene in its vigorous light and shade, and suggestion of the body beneath the clothes (see p. 283). And yet in the text Miss Greenaway laments the badness of the pen! A better pen would have produced a worse sketch. It was a quill that she habitually used, and, in spite of the broad line it compelled, she made good use of it. In the heading to her letter to Miss Dickinson, dated October 19, 1897, we can positively feel the wind that is scattering the leaves around the old oak. The girl with the candle, in her letter to Mrs. Locker-Lampson, which reminds us of Caldecott; the little ‘Violets, Sir?’ which reminds us of Leech; the dancing children, one with a tambourine, the other with hand on hip, who remind us of Stothard; the group of three dancing children, which has been compared with the work of Lady Waterford; and the letter to John Ruskin showing the sketch of reaper and sheaf-binder—are all drawn with the broad-nibbed quill, with consummate ease and masterly effect, and they give even more pleasure to the educated eye than the charming little pencil sketches such as those in the possession of Lady Pontifex.

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The early sketch-books of Kate Greenaway reveal some rather unexpected phases of her development before she had produced any work characteristic enough to be recognised as hers by the public. It is with surprise that we see how well she drew in the very first stage of her career. As the reader will remember, her first leanings were towards the comic—as in the humorous sketch of the lovelorn swain piping to his ridiculous love (p. 279): a drawing which Phiz might have been willing to acknowledge; or, again, the little girl and sprite walking arm-in-arm (see p. 75). Then the romantic moved her, and in the spirit of the great illustrators of the ‘sixties she made the rapid pencil sketch (for composition) of a princess in a castle kissing a farewell to some sailor-boy whose ship scuds one way while the sails belly the other; and, again, a long-hosed gallant gracefully doffing his cap to a ‘faire ladye’ at a window (see p. 45). Rough as they are, both are well drawn, especially the latter, but they give no hint whatever of the art which was to spring from them.

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Similarly with her pen-sketches. The design, dashed off at lightning speed, of an eighteenth-century scene at Christmas eve might almost be the work of Phiz or Cruikshank; and the power of managing many figures on a small sheet of paper is already fully developed. So, too, in a drawing of a totally different class—‘The Picnic.’ Miss Greenaway had been much impressed, in common with the rest of the fraternity of London artists, by the work of the Scottish artist Mr. William Small, and had attempted to probe into his method of handling, particularly in the technical treatment of form and texture in the coat worn by the central figure. It need hardly be said that these sketches, and others in the manner of Leighton, Mr. Holman Hunt, and so on, were in no sense copies, or even imitations. They were intended only as studies with a view to analysing each man’s style, for the purpose of self-education. That mastered, or at least understood, she turned to her own work, and began to feel her way towards the light.

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