Illustrated Songbooks, Part IV

This post is part of the Illustrated Songbooks series.

Songbook Illustrated by Kate Greenaway

A Day in A Child's Life, music by Myles Birket Foster and illustrated by Kate Greenaway.

Kate Greenaway was an English illustrator who was born in 1846. She’s best known for her illustrations of children’s books, especially the depictions of children wearing her version of clothing from the 18th century. These illustrations proved to be so popular that in the 1880s and 1890s, some parents dressed their children in the same way.

Myles Birket Foster was born in England in 1851 and was an organist and composer who wrote music for children’s voices. His father, also named Myles Birket Foster, was a popular English illustrator, watercolour artist, and engraver of his day.

Songbooks Illustrated by Rie Cramer

Spring Flowers, music by Geertruida Vogel and illustrations by Rie Cramer

Old Songs in French and English, illustrations by Rie Cramer

Rie Cramer was a Dutch illustrator born in Indonesia in 1887. She and Henriette Willebeek le Mair were two of the important Dutch illustrators of children’s books between World Wars I & II. She also wrote plays under the pseudonym “Marc Holman,” made pottery with one of her friends, created set designs and costumes for plays, and more. During World War II, she joined the resistance, helped fugitives from the Nazis, and wrote anti-German poems in one of the underground newspapers of the resistance.

Little is known about Geertruida Vogel other than she was a singer and a composer from the Netherlands. She wrote other music for children, including a setting of six of the poems from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.