Beatrix Potter1866–1943Study of a snake
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Museo de Victoria y Alberto
Londres, Reino Unido
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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.
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.
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As a young woman Beatrix Potter studied natural history with some seriousness, exploring the collections of the Natural History Museum, including the insect cases and fungi specimens. She had a collector’s cabinet full of specimens, from shells to dead butterflies and moths, and used a magnifying glass and a microscope to examine them more closely. She made numerous carefully observed studies of animals and plants from life.
This study of a snake is characteristic of Potter’s early work and may possibly have been made during on her visits to London’s Zoological Gardens.
Museo de Victoria y Alberto
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- Museo de Victoria y Alberto
- Imagen: Museo de Victoria y Alberto — © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Mientras tanto, en la vida de Beatrix Potter
La vida enterachildhood
A schoolroom turned menagerie
The schoolroom of Beatrix and Bertram housed mice, rabbits, a hedgehog, bats, frogs and a newt named Isaac Newton, alongside collections of butterflies and other insects; the animals even went on long holidays, and the children watched them closely and drew them endlessly. Among the favourites were two rabbits — one of them, Peter, Beatrix walked on a lead, took with her on trains and dressed in a blue jacket, and later wrote her first tale about him.
in youth
The Royal Academy and John Everett Millais
In her teens Beatrix was a regular visitor to London’s art galleries, especially enjoying the Royal Academy’s summer and winter exhibitions; her journal shows the growth of her taste and critical eye. She was also influenced by her father’s friend, the painter Sir John Everett Millais, who recognised her gift of observation.
1881–1897
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.
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.
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.
