Now All of You Come Listen

Greenaway helped transform children’s literature of the Victorian age through her innovative and artistic approach. This drawing is a preliminary design for her first book, Under the Window, which established the style for which she became known. It features imagery that evokes a time far removed from the industrial age in which she lived. Figures dressed in old-fashioned bonnets and ruffles and a soft rosy-green palette lend a dreamlike quality. Here, three children scamper along a path toward a green garden gate set in the middle of a flowering hedge. The image is accompanied by a droll and somewhat nonsensical verse, its lines following the curve of the garden path (2022).