The Magic Lantern Illustrated By Kate Greenaway

This 65-page hardback album entitled "La lanterne magique" by J. Levoisin is illustrated by Kate Grenaway, the famous 19th-century British illustrator. This French version was published by Hachette around 1885. It presents around fifty short stories accompanied by charming illustrations. Born in 1846, the daughter of a woodcarver, Kate Greenaway developed a passion for drawing at a very early age. She began by making greeting cards and other small illustration works. 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 engraving as many plates as there were colors, and adjusting the plates during the different printings that few printers in Europe were able to ensure with as much clarity and cleanliness as Edmund Evans. Her first book, published in 1879, was a triumph and established Kate Greenaway's reputation as one of the most popular children's book illustrators of all time. She has been enchanting people, young and old, for over a hundred years with her watercolour illustrations of charming and sweet children in their picturesque costumes and idyllic scenes. Greenaway's children are dressed in old-fashioned fashions, in the fashion of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, thus referring to an "old time" in a confusion of the individual time of childhood 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 is disfigured, in the 19th century, by industry, the railway, etc. Kate Greenaway died in 1901 at the same time as Queen Victoria, whose reign she had accompanied.