Beatrix Potter1866–1943Two squirrels sitting on a log
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Museu Vitória e 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.
This highly detailed watercolour of two red squirrels on a log was probably intended as a design for a greetings card. A number of other versions of this composition exist in varying degrees of finish; a group of three drawings sold at Sotheby’s in 2008 (lot 302) and there are various versions in the Warne Archive, including a back view of the squirrels. Potter may have intended the design as a greetings card for Hildesheimer & Faulkner in the 1890s. In 1928 Frederick Warne & Co. considered using them as covers for a calendar.
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Potter’s best known depiction of red squirrels was within her ‘little book’, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (Frederick Warne 1903).
Museu Vitória e Alberto
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- BP.376
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- Museu Vitória e Alberto: the museum's own open data · obtido há 10 dias
- Imagem: Museu Vitória e Alberto — © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Entretanto, na vida de Beatrix Potter
A vida inteira1881–1897
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.
