In the late Victorian period one of the most prolific English contemporary illustrators was artist Kate Greenaway. Her naive drawings of children and young women in an early, bucolic, idealized England proved to be a popular inspiration for artists throughout the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s.
The Wedgwood pottery clearly believed there to be a market for work appealing to this audience. Their majolica line of Kate Greenaway ceramics in dessert sets, wall pockets, cane stands and tableware proved to be clever, colorful, beautiful and very profitable.
In the late 1870's Wedgwood hired illustrator Helen Jane Arundel Miles to create drawings in the Kate Greenaway style for their tiles. Helen Miles created a good number of series for Wedgwood. These included among them images for a series based on characters from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her series in the Kate Greenaway style was called Old English. These images were also used on plates. Here are some images from the Shakespeare series:
Helen Miles was a rarity in Victorian England. Educated in South Kensington she was professional woman, an illustrator whose work was widely exhibited. She created post cards and greeting cards, illuminated Bibles, storybooks and coloring books for children. Her work appeared in periodical such as Once A Week, a magazine showcase for contemporary artists. Her work had a charming simplicity that lent itself to a variety of media including print and pottery.
The series Old English, or Months as it was sometimes called, was created for tiles, but like the Shakespeare pattern it was soon adapted to plates as well. The plates used established transferware border designs for their base and shapes like Wedgwood majolica's open border Key pattern as the canvas for her drawings. The tile illustrations were sometimes surrounded by the Bellflower patterns on the tiles or superimposed in the round central area of the majolica plates with their original square border intact. Some designs were monochromatic but many were hand colored.
