Beatrix Potter1866–1943drawing
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Über das Werk
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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The drawing of a frog fishing seen on the front of this sheet was made as a preparatory study for Potter’s series of drawings ‘A Frog He Would A- Fishing Go’. The illustrations were inspired by the gentleman frog in Randolph Caldecott’s picture book, A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go, printed by Edmund Evans for George Routledge in 1883 and later for Frederick Warne in 1895. In February 1884, Rupert Potter, Beatrix’s father, purchased two pen and ink drawings by Caldecott made in preparation for this book. Beatrix Potter intended her drawings for A Frog He Would A-Fishing Go to be published as a booklet, however, having approached the firm of Ernest Nister was told ‘I am a little doubtful of whether we can take it, we certainly cannot make a booklet of it as people do not want frogs now.
The only way in which we could use it would be as a double page in our ‘Annual’…’ Following some negotiation, most of the designs were purchased by Ernest Nister for publication; in 1896 they were published in Nister’s Holiday Annual and in Comical Customers at the New Stores of Comical Rhymes and Stories. A version of this design appears on the second page of the sequence in the ‘Holiday Annual’. There is also a more finished version of the composition in the collection; see V&A object number BP.507(i).
Potter also used the verso of this sheet to make drawings of the frog character: in the most developed study on the sheet he is shown among plants holding a fishing net. This composition was not used in the finished ‘A Frog He Would a-Fishing Go’ series of drawings.
The story eventually developed into The Tale of Jeremy Fisher, which was published by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1906.
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- Inventarnummer
- BP.507(h)
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Derweil im Leben von Beatrix Potter
Das ganze Leben1881–1897
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.
September 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.
1895–1897
A theory of spore germination, and Kew Gardens
In 1895, curious about how fungi reproduce, Beatrix began microscopic drawings of agaric spores and developed a theory of their germination. Through her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, she consulted botanists at Kew and convinced George Massee of her ability to germinate spores, but William Thiselton-Dyer, the director of Kew, rebuffed her because of her sex and amateur status.
