Object description :
"The Language Of Flowers Illustrated By Kate Greenaway"
This 81-page book is an original English edition, edited by Edmund Evans in London probably around 1930. In this work, Kate Greenaway, the famous British designer, offers a wonderfully illustrated glossary of the language of flowers. The flowers are listed in alphabetical order with the corresponding symbolic meaning opposite. Each page has one or more illustrations of flowers or family scenes. At the end of the book, there are poems relating to flowers.
Born in 1846, daughter of a woodcarver, Kate Greenaway developed a passion for drawing very early on. She starts by making greeting cards and other small illustration jobs. When she wanted to publish her own images and texts, her father introduced her to the publisher Edmund Evans. At that time, color printing still required the engraving of as many plates as there are colors, and an adjustment of the plates during the different prints that few printers in Europe were able to ensure with so many crispness and neatness than Edmund Evans. Her first book published in 1879 ended in triumph and established the reputation of Kate Greenaway as one of the most popular children's book illustrators of all time. She has enchanted people, young and old, for over a hundred years with her watercolor illustrations of charming and gentle children with their quaint costumes and idyllic scenes. Greenaway's children are dressed in antiquated fashion in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, thus referencing an "old time" in a confusion of individual childhood time and the collective past. If Kate Greenaway appeals to the pastoral imagination of a society before the industrial revolution, it is out of romantic nostalgia for a nature that was disfigured, in the nineteenth century, by industry, the railroad, etc. Kate Greenaway died in 1901 at the same time as Queen Victoria, whose reign she accompanied.