Study of two snails
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.
From early childhood Beatrix Potter spent time drawing the many pets that she kept in her schoolroom: over the years, her pets included lizards, snails, bats, mice, rabbits and many other animals. During the family’s long summer holidays to rural areas she also took the opportunity to draw the plants and animals she saw in the countryside. Even her earliest childhood drawings show a serious interest in natural history, her sketches annotated with information about the species concerned.
This undated sheet shows two snails. For a related study in the Linder Bequest, see museum number BP.404(a).
Victoria and Albert Museum
Particulars
- Accession number
Meanwhile, in the life of Beatrix Potter
The whole life28 July 1866
Birth in London
Helen Beatrix was born at 2 Bolton Gardens in West Brompton, London, into a comfortable Unitarian family: her father, the barrister Rupert Potter, was also a keen amateur photographer, and her paternal grandfather, Edmund Potter, owned the largest calico-printing works in England and sat in Parliament. She was educated by three governesses; she and her younger brother Walter Bertram, born in 1872, had few friends outside their large extended family.
1882
The Lake District and Hardwicke Rawnsley
When Dalguise was no longer available, the Potters spent their first summer in the Lake District in 1882, at Wray Castle near Lake Windermere; sixteen-year-old Beatrix fell in love with its beauty and resolved to live there one day. There she met Hardwicke Rawnsley, the vicar of Wray and later founding secretary of the National Trust, whose views on the countryside left a lasting mark on her.
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.
