Seated Woman with Basket

As a child, Greenaway spent her summers with relatives in a country village, and these informed her later work as a popular writer and illustrator of children’s books. Her drawings often depict an idyllic rural past populated by the kinds of characters she remembered from her early visits. This drawing comes from an archive of nearly one hundred early works depicting the landscape and people she encountered. The image of an old woman with a basket on her lap is less overtly nostalgic than her book illustrations. It is an especially careful study of the figure’s dress, worked in layers of transparent washes over a preliminary graphite drawing. Images like this may have served as references for costumes in Greenaway’s later work (2022).