She specialized in drawings showing young children playing in idyllic settings, generally carried out in line drawing with basic colouring. By the 1880s, her illustrations were falling out of fashion.
Ruskin on GreenawayRuskin praised the naive, pre-industrial quality of Greenaway's work in a lecture called 'Fairy Land':
'There are no railroads in it to carry the children away with, are there? no tunnel or pit mouths to swallow them up [...] no vestige, in fact, of science, civilization, economical arrangements, or commercial enterprise!!!' (
Works, 33, pp. 347).
Ruskin tried to steer Greenaway towards working from nature, rather than from the mind's eye. He sent her items from his garden to paint, such as turf and leaves.