There are those who sneer at nationality in art. You can no more speak of English art, laughed Whistler, than you can speak of English mathematics. The analogy is entirely a false one. You can say with truth ‘English art’ as you can say ‘German music’; for although art in its language is universal, in its expression it is national, or at least racial; and it is the merit of a nation to express itself frankly in its art in its own natural way, and to despise the affectation of self-presentation in the terms and in the guise of foreign practice not native to itself. It is a matter of sincerity and, moreover, of good sense; for little respect is deserved or received by a man who affects to speak his language with a foreign accent. Kate Greenaway was intensely and unfeignedly English: for that she is beloved in her own country, and for that she is appreciated and respected abroad. Like Hogarth, Reynolds, and Millais, she was the unadulterated product of England, and like them she gave us of her ‘English art.’
In the latter part of her career Kate Greenaway modified her manner of water-colour painting, mainly with the view to obtaining novelty of effect and conquering public approval. At the beginning she had tried to make finished pictures, as we see in the moonlight scene of ‘The Elf Ring.’ Then when she discovered her true _métier_, influenced by the requirements of Mr. Edmund Evans’s wood-block printing, to which she adapted herself with consummate ease, she used outline in pen or pencil, with delicate washes in colour: these drawings were made in every case, of course, for publication in books. Their ready independent sale encouraged her to elaborate her little pictures, and her election as Member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours confirmed her in the decision to turn her attention to pure water-colour painting. The decreasing demand for book-illustration influenced her somewhat in taking the new work very seriously, encouraged thereto by Ruskin, who, as we have seen, was forever crying out for ‘a bit of Nature.’ So she painted landscapes which, in point of technique, lacked some of the accidental grace and freshness and serious depth which should be essential to such work, although they were rich in her own sentimental and tender way of seeing things. Then in figure painting she abandoned her outlines and indulged in the full strong colour which Ruskin always begged from her. That she should have fused this vigour of coloration with her own native faculty for daintiness—as for example in ‘Lucy Locket’—must be accounted to her credit.