Mr. Ruskin and Miss Greenaway

Abstract

Mr. Ruskin and Miss Greenaway Michael Patrick Hearn (bio) In 1878, with the publication of her unpretentious collection of verses and pictures titled Under the Window, Kate Greenaway became a household name. As her chief rival Walter Crane explained, "The grace and charm of her children and young girls were quickly recognized, and her treatment of quaint early nine-teenth-century costume, prim gardens, and the child-like spirit of her designs in an old-world atmosphere, though touched with conscious modern 'aestheticism,' captivated the public in a remarkable way."1 This reclusive spinster suddenly became the confidante of poets and princesses. She was lionized and parodied in the press. Greenaway boys and girls appeared (often without the artist's permission) on porcelain and pewter, on toys and wallpaper. Her simple style of dress, derived in part from the Empire period, became the rage in the late Victorian age, and for once Paris in coining the term Greenawisme looked to London for inspiration in fashion. Being as popular in the New as in the Old World, Kate Greenaway was credited with dressing the children of two continents. This illustrator had no greater champion that John Ruskin, the most influential English art critic of the day. He was enchanted by Under the Window, and he at once wrote her an eccentric letter of great praise: "I lay awake half (no, a quarter) of last night thinking of the hundred things I want to say to you—and never shall get said!—and I'm giddy and weary, and now can't say even half or a quarter of one out of the hundred. They're about you,—and your gifts—and your graces, and your fancies, and your—yes, perhaps one or two little—tiny faults."2 He wanted to know if she believed in fairies, in ghosts, in principalities or powers, in Heaven. "Do you only draw pretty children out of your head?" he persisted. "In my parish school there are at least twenty prettier than any in your [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 23] book . . . they are like—very ill-dressed Angeli. Could you draw groups of these as they are?" She was touched by this enthusiasm and treasured the opinions, both the good and the bad. They soon became fast friends, discussing possible collaborations, perhaps a new edition of Beauty and the Beast or a book on botany (he sent her "sods" for nature studies). Most of these suggestions, however, came to nothing. He invited her to visit him in his country home, where she found much to admire: "Such wild wide stretches of country and then such mountains—such mossy trees and stones—such a lake—such a shore—such pictures—such books—my mind was entirely content and satisfied."3 Why did the great defender of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites devote so much time and energy toward the promotion of Kate Greenaway's humble art? Her appeal was in part nostalgic; she knew him when he was recalling his childhood, during the writing of his autobiography Praeterita. Clearly the author of Modern Painters had altered his aesthetics. He who once defended Turner against accusations that the landscape painter had hurled "hand-fuls of white, and blue, and red, at the canvas, letting what chanced to stick, stick," now attacked Whistler's nocturnes as "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."4 Ruskin had long been known for his unorthodox opinions of art; for example, he argued that George Cruikshank's illustrations for German Popular Stories (1823 and 1826) of the Brothers Grimm "are the finest things, next to Rembrandt's, that . . . have been done since etching was invented."5 Ruskin was now growing old. To many of his colleagues he had become, as the American expatriate called him, "the Peter Parley of Painting."6 In these later years, Ruskin suffered from recurrent bouts of madness. His mind had never fully accepted his loss of faith and the renunciation of narrow Puritanism for humanism. More significantly he had fallen in love with a girl thirty years his junior. Rose LaTouche was only nine years old when...