Catherine Greenaway was a 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 South Kensington School of Art and the Royal Female School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning holiday card market, producing Christmas and Valentine’s cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, printed Under the Window, an instant best-selller, 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.
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. Not long after Greenaway's birth, her father left Ebenezer Landells engraving firm. He received a commission to engrave illustrations for a new edition of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, and, in order to concentrate on the work, sent his family to live with relatives in the country. They spent about two years in Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, where Kate would return frequently during her childhood and a place which affected her deeply. According to children's literature scholar Humphrey Carpenter that period was to her "crucial ... she felt it to be her real home, a country of the mind that she could always reimagine"; a place to continually reimagine and embellish as a contrast to the grimy London streets.
Greenaway was never paid for the work – the publisher went bankrupt – leaving the family without income. On the return of his wife and children, the family moved to Islington, where Elizabeth Greenaway opened a children's dress shop. They lived in a flat above. Outside the building was a garden, which Greenaway wrote about in letters and an unfinished autobiography in the 1880s, describing it as place with "richness of colour and depth of shade."
Her father engraved illustrations for weekly publications, among them The Illustrated London News, often bringing home the wood blocks to be carved during the night. The work interested his young daughter, and Kate was exposed to illustrations by John Leech, John Gilbert and Kenny Meadows. She read chapbook versions of fairy tales, noting later her favourites were "Sleeping Beauty", "Cinderella", and "Beauty and the Beast", and enjoyed reading illustrated editions of Shakespeare, writing "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." Alongside fairy tales and Shakespeare, she was exposed each week to current news stories, some quite grisly, such as the illustrations her father engraved about murderer William Palmer for the Illustrated London News in 1856.
As a young child Greenaway's parents taught her at home; later she was sent to various dame schools. In 1857, at age 12, she began night classes at nearby Finsbury School, a local branch of South Kensington School of Art participating in National Course of Art Training in the decorative arts. Night courses, open only to women, were offered in drawing, porcelain painting, wood engraving and lithography. She enrolled full-time a year later. The curriculum, devised by Henry Cole, was meant to train artisans in designing decorative wallpaper, tiles and carpets. It emphasised strict adherence to copying geometric and botanical elements without creativity. There were of four stages of courses, which she completed in 1864 before going to the Royal Female School of Art.
The headmaster at the Royal Female School of Art was Richard Burchett, whom Elizabeth Thompson described as a "bearded, velvet-skull-capped and cold-searching-eyed man." Greenaway was quite shy and thought of herself as plain and unattractive compared to the other students. Yet she became friends with the much more popular Thompson , with whom she shared a studio. The two young women worked diligently in their studio to perfect their skills. At this point she was allowed to draw human figures, at first from plaster casts and then from models dressed in historical or ornamental costumes, skills she applied during the summers in Rolleston. However she was unable to fully master human anatomy; frustrated that nude models were not permitted in the women's classes, she enrolled in night classes at Heatherley School of Fine Art where she met Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter and Walter Crane.
In 1871 she enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art, where Poynter was head master. Determined to break from Henry Cole's rigid curriculum, he exhorted students to become more expressive and creative, concepts alien to Greenaway whose long early years of training consisted solely of copying and work with geometric designs. She struggled at Heatherley and once again was frustrated that women were segregated from men in the life class.

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