凯特·格林威

凯特·格林纳威（英语：Kate Greenaway，1846年3月17日—1901年11月6日）是维多利亚时代英国的插画家及绘本作家，被誉为儿童绘本的先驱之一。她创作的首本童书《窗下》在1878年出版后广受欢迎，使她与蓝道夫·凯迪克齐名。

著名儿童绘本奖项凯特·格林纳威奖即是以她的名字命名的。

生平

凯特·格林纳威的父亲约翰·格林纳威是一位小有名气的雕刻师，母亲伊丽莎白则是位裁缝师，有一间制作童装的店铺。

格林纳威在12岁时正式上学，接受艺术教育。21岁时开始从事插画工作。

1877年，格林纳威向知名木刻家艾德蒙·伊凡斯展示了她创作的一些画作和诗作，伊凡斯便决定将这些作品引制成书出版。1878年，《窗下》（Under the Window）由劳特里奇出版，首版印制两万本、每本售价六先令，是为格林纳威的首本书籍，很快成为了畅销书，格林纳威也因此闻名于世。这本书还引起了著名艺术评论家约翰·拉斯金的关注，他亲自写信给格林纳威予以鼓励和肯定。

1901年11月，格林纳威因乳腺癌病逝。其遗体在沃金火化，并葬于汉普斯特德公墓。

纪念

1955年，英国图书馆协会将新设立的儿童绘本奖项命名为“凯特·格林纳威奖”，用以纪念她。

Catherine Greenaway (17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901) was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning greetings card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer Edmund Evans printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evans continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s.

The depictions of children in imaginary 18th-century costumes in a Queen Anne style were extremely popular in England and internationally, sparking the Kate Greenaway style. Within a few years of the publication of Under the Window Greenaway's work was imitated in England, Germany, and the United States.

Childhood

Kate Greenaway was born in Hoxton, London, the second of four children, to a working-class family. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a dress maker and her father, John, an engraver who gave up steady employment with Ebenezer Landells' engraving firm to strike out on his own. When Greenaway was very young, he accepted a commission to provide the engraved illustrations to a new edition of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, sending his young family away to relatives in the countryside to give himself solitude while producing the engravings. Kate's earliest memories are of Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, which affected her deeply. It was a place she returned to frequently in her childhood. 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". After returning to grimy London streets Rolleston became a place to visit in her mind and constantly embellish.

The publisher who commissioned John Greenaway's work went bankrupt, leaving the family without an income. When Elizabeth Greenaway returned from Rolleston with the children, the family moved to Islington, where she opened a children's dress shop that attracted well-to-do clients.

The family lived in the flat above the shop, and young Kate, often left to her own devices to explore, 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."

John Greenaway provided for his mother and two sisters as well as for his own family. He took piecemeal engraving jobs, usually for weekly publications, such as The Illustrated London News. He frequently worked on the wood carving throughout the night in front of the fire. Kate enjoyed watching him, and through his work was exposed to illustrations by John Leech, John Gilbert, and Kenny Meadows.

As a young child Greenaway's parents taught her at home; later she was sent to various dame schools; 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." Her father's engravings exposed her to weekly news stories, some of which were quite grisly, such as the series of his illustrations for The Illustrated London News in 1856 about murderer William Palmer.