Kate Greenaway: The Elf Ring Postcard

From the book Kate Greenaway by M.H. Spielmann and G.S. Layard. London. Adam and Charles Black, 1905. Description from the book: From a large water-colour drawing in the possession of John Greenaway, Esq. Catherine Greenaway (17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901), known as Kate Greenaway, was an English children's book illustrator and writer. "Kate Greenaway" children, all of them little girls and boys too young to be put in trousers, according to the conventions of the time, were dressed in her own versions of late eighteenth century and Regency fashions: smock-frocks and skeleton suits for boys, high-waisted pinafores and dresses with mobcaps and straw bonnets for girls. The influence of children's clothes in portraits by British painter John Hoppner (1758–1810) may have provided her some inspiration. Liberty of London adapted Kate Greenaway's drawings as designs for actual children's clothes. 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.