Beatrix Potter1866–1943The Mice in their Storeroom
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Hvor er »The Mice in their Storeroom« i dag? Samling: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Ikke udstillet lige nu. Kontrolleret 25. september 2026.
London, Storbritannien
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Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) is one of the world's best-loved children's authors and illustrators. She wrote the majority of the twenty-three Original Peter Rabbit Books between 1901 and 1913. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Frederick Warne, 1902) is her most famous and best-loved tale.
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Beatrix Potter made many imaginary drawings in the 1890s, before her books had been published. This highly finished drawing is known as ‘The Mice in their Storeroom’. Two mice are shown with sacks of grain and hanging ears of wheat, one of the mice holding a bunch of keys. The Potter scholar Leslie Linder noted that the setting of the scene was based on ‘one of the back passages at Bedwell Lodge’, Hertfordshire, which Beatrix Potter visited in the summer of 1891. A detailed study Potter made of the back stairs at Bedwell Lodge in the collection is dated 21 September 1891 and corresponds with the background. The potting shed at Bedwell Lodge would later inspire Potter’s illustration of Mr McGregor’s tool-shed in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
There is also a preparatory study for this drawing in the collection.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Oplysninger
- Inventarnummer
- BP.430
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- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Billede: Victoria and Albert Museum — © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Imens i livet hos Beatrix Potter
Hele livet1881–1897
A journal in a cipher of her own
From 1881 Beatrix kept a journal in a simple substitution cipher of her own devising — in tiny handwriting, serving as both sketchbook and literary experiment, in which she described society, her impressions of art and the life around her. The entries stop in 1897, when her energies were absorbed in scientific study and in efforts to publish her drawings.
1890–1894
First commissions: cards, rabbits and frogs
In the 1890s Beatrix printed Christmas and other greeting cards of her own design — her first commercially successful works. In 1890 the firm of Hildesheimer and Faulkner bought several drawings of her rabbit Benjamin Bunny to illustrate Frederic Weatherly’s verses “A Happy Pair”, in 1893 several more for “Our Dear Relations”, and in 1894 the publisher Ernest Nister took a series of frog illustrations and verses for the annual “Changing Pictures”.
summer 1892
Charles McIntosh and the fungi
In the summer of 1892, at Dunkeld in Perthshire, Beatrix met Charles McIntosh, a revered naturalist and amateur mycologist: he helped make her illustrations more accurate, taught her taxonomy and supplied her with live specimens to paint in winter. By the 1890s her scientific interests had centred on mycology; she was first drawn to fungi by their colours and their evanescence.
1893
A letter to Noel Moore about four rabbits
In September 1893, on holiday at Eastwood near Dunkeld, Beatrix ran out of things to write to Noel, the often-ill eldest son of her former governess Annie Carter Moore, and told him a story about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter”. It became one of the most famous children’s letters ever written and the basis of her future career; it was Annie who later suggested that such letters might make good children’s books.
