The Stick Fire

Kate Greenaway began her career designing Christmas and Valentine’s cards but gained lasting recognition with her 1879 children’s book Under the Window. She went on to illustrate over 150 books.

Greenaway attended  night courses for women. The classes focused on decorative arts like drawing, porcelain painting, and wood engraving. They emphasised copying botanical and geometric designs to prepare women for roles in wallpaper, carpet, and tile design.

In 1864, Greenaway attended the Royal Female School of Art, where she was allowed to study the human figure. Victorian society deemed life drawing  inappropriate for women, so she practiced from plaster casts and clothed models.

The Stick Fire illustrates how Greenaway depicted children in idealised late 18th century and Regency-style clothing. These costumes, influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, were so popular they helped revive the fashions they portrayed.

Visual description: A watercolour in muted, autumnal colours. The sky is a pale, subdued blue and the hills a soft green. The gnarly branches of five trees and saplings in the middle ground have almost lost all their leaves. The little that remain are brown. A wooden gate stands beside a lone tree on the far left. In contrast, the other trees are clustered together at the top of the hill, which serves as the setting of the painting. In the foreground, five children in 18th century clothing gather around a fire. There are no flames but a tall column of grey smoke, rising into the sky as high as the tallest child.

On the left side of the fire, an older girl in a pink dress stands in profile. Her arm rests gently against the face of a much younger child dressed in white, who clasps her arm in return. Almost directly in front of the fire, a child stands with their back to the viewer, holding up their skirt as if drying their socks. To their right, an older girl in a dark brown dress crouches low, poking the fire with a stick. At the centre of the scene, behind the fire, a young boy stands with his hands behind back, gazing out of the frame. His rosy cheeks stand out against the painting’s otherwise muted palette.  

The bottom left is signed K Greenaway in ink.