Beatrix Potter1866–1943Watercolour
May one see it?
Not receiving at present
Victoria and Albert Museum
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 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.
Read on
After her marriage and permanent move to the Lake District at the age of 47 in 1913, Potter spent less time creating books; while the previous twelve years had seen one or two new stories published each year, after 1913 only a few more were to come. She had, however, planned a book for 1914 – The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, ‘about a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life, and goes out hunting with a little gun… dressed up like puss in boots’. Potter complained to her publishers that she lacked ‘time and opportunity’ to work on the drawings for the tale. Although she finished the text, the frontispiece was the only completed illustration, and the book was not published.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Particulars
- Accession number
- BP.615
In the catalog
Sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Image: Victoria and Albert Museum — © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Meanwhile, in the life of Beatrix Potter
The whole life1903–1922
Two or three books a year with the editor Norman Warne
“The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin” and “The Tailor of Gloucester” followed “Peter Rabbit” in 1903 — both also began as picture letters to the Moore children. Working with the editor Norman Warne, Beatrix published two or three little books a year — 23 in all in that format, the last, in 1922, being “Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes”; the royalties gave her a degree of independence, though she still lived with her parents.
1905–1913 · Education
governance
summer 1912
William Heelis proposes
By the summer of 1912 William Heelis, the solicitor with whom Beatrix handled the affairs of her farms, had proposed and she had accepted; she did not tell her parents at once, and they again disapproved, since Heelis was only a country solicitor.
15 October 1913
Marriage to William Heelis and the move to Near Sawrey
On 15 October 1913, at St Mary Abbots in Kensington, the 47-year-old Beatrix married William Heelis and moved with him straight to Near Sawrey, to Castle Cottage, the renovated farmhouse on Castle Farm. Hill Top remained a working farm but was remodelled to house the tenant family and her private studio and workshop.
c. 15.10.1913
Married: William Heelis
1914
Her father’s death, and her mother’s move to the Lake District
In 1914 Beatrix’s father, Rupert Potter, died; with the outbreak of the First World War she persuaded her widowed mother to move to the Lake District and rented her a house in Sawrey, from which she soon moved to Lindeth Howe in Bowness. Beatrix herself kept writing for Warne and threw herself into country life: she set up a nursing trust (for district nurses) for the surrounding villages and sat on committees dealing with footpaths and other rural matters.
