‘My house is red’

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‘My house is red’.

Kate Greenaway (1846-1901)

1879

Coloured wood-block engraving by Edmund Evans

Under the Window, 54

Greenaway at her most sentimental, projecting an Edenic vision of childhood where the world is made up of simplified objects – a ‘little house’, a ‘green, green tree’ and a ‘little basket’. This toy-town escapism is nevertheless a distinctly poetic vision, more a place of aspiration and yearning than a reality. [Commentary continues below.]

Scan, text and formatting by Simon Cooke.

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Greenaway’s art was essentially graphic design rather than illustration on its own, with each page organized into a pattern of motifs. Though nominally realistic, her imagery is also an abstraction in which natural forms are simplified in a manner reminiscent of Aestheticism and Japanese wood-cuts (which were of course a distinct influence on the Aesthetic art of D. G. Rossetti and Albert Moore, among others). In this design, she reduces the blue fence and trees to stylized units, while the red house and hedgerow are figured as decorative motifs rather than representations of real places.

Bibliography

Greenaway, Kate. Under the Window. London: George Routledge, 1879.

Created 14 June 2021