Beatrix Potter1866–1943Rough sketch illustrating 'The Three Spinners'
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Not on view at present
Where is “Rough sketch illustrating 'The Three Spinners'” now? Collection: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Not on view at present. Checked September 25, 2026.
London, United Kingdom
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the work
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.
In the 1890s Potter sketched illustrations for fairy tales including Cinderella, Puss-in-Boots, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty. Her later idea to publish ‘a set of fairy tales in thin volumes’ never materialised, but some of her manuscripts and sketches survive.
Read on
This rough preparatory sketch is thought to relate to the Grimms' fairy tale The Three Spinners, in which three fairy women, one with a swollen foot, complete a huge amount of spinning for a beautiful but lazy girl. In Potter’s drawing the girl appears to greet the spinner with a swollen foot. She annotated the sheet: ‘Old fairy woman is rather good. She should have an enormous foot.’ Potter studied Grimms' fairy tales as a young woman and included a written version of this particular tale as Chapter 11, ‘Habbitrot’, in her later book, The Fairy Caravan (Alexander McKay, 1929). This drawing has also been associated with Snow White.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Details
- Accession number
- BP.441
What it shows
In the catalog
Sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Image: Victoria and Albert Museum — © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
In the life of Beatrix Potter
The whole life1881–1897
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.
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.
1897
A paper for the Linnean Society
In 1897 Beatrix submitted a paper, “On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae”, to the Linnean Society, but as a woman she could neither attend the meeting nor read it herself — George Massee introduced it. She later withdrew it on realising that some of her samples were contaminated, yet she continued her microscopic studies for several more years.
1900–1901
A dummy book of the rabbit tale, printed at her own expense
In 1900 Beatrix revised her tale of the four little rabbits and made a dummy book of it — it has been suggested, in imitation of Helen Bannerman’s 1899 bestseller; no one would buy it. So in December 1901 she had it printed at her own expense for family and friends — in black and white, with a coloured frontispiece.
