Beatrix Potter’s “Peter Rabbit” first emerged in a picture letter to 4-year-old Noel Moore, the son of her former governess. It began: “I don’t know what to write to you so I shall tell you a story.”
Years later, Potter borrowed that letter to create “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.” People usually know Potter through Peter, but the tale of her life is more fascinating. Not only was Potter a writer and illustrator, but she was also an avid naturalist, sheep farmer, and conservationist.
“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is the first major exhibition to focus on Potter’s life, beyond her books’ characters. It’s a collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Trust (a UK land and conservation charity). Both institutions hold the UK’s largest collections of Potter’s work.
The exhibition demonstrates the importance of Potter’s legacy beyond children’s literature.
Learning Art
Potter didn’t go to school. A governess taught her subjects such as Latin, French, geometry, and math until her late teens. She also introduced Potter to great art in London’s museums and galleries near the family’s home in Bolton Gardens, South Kensington.Potter was overwhelmed by her first visit to the Royal Academy of Art when she was 17 years old. “I never thought there could be such pictures. It is almost too much to see them all at once—just fancy seeing five magnificent Van Dyck’s [sic] side by side, before me who never thought to see one. It is rather a painful pleasure, but I seldom felt such a great one,” she wrote in her journal dated Jan. 13, 1883.
She loved Sir Joshua Reynolds’s work, but she especially admired Angelica Kauffman. The exhibition’s co-curator Helen Antrobus believes Potter saw Kauffman’s painting “Design,” one in a series of four paintings on the elements of art. In “Design,” a woman painter is copying an ancient statue of a man’s torso. Of Potter’s viewing the painting, “I think she was inspired by Kauffman’s talent,” Antrobus said by telephone.
Although Potter had formal drawing lessons, she learned a lot by copying great art and artifacts at the Natural History Museum and the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). No object was out of bounds: “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote.
Art at Home
Art and creativity in the Potter home also inspired her. Her father, who was a barrister, had sketched in his youth, her mother painted in watercolors, and her brother enjoyed landscape painting. Her parents were modest art collectors and owned a Caldecott painting. She copied the bookcovers of her grandmother’s “Iliad“ and ”Odyssey,” which John Flaxman had illustrated. Flaxman had also designed many of Wedgwood’s sculptural reliefs that Potter once copied in clay.
All Creatures Great and Small
Potter’s parents encouraged her drawing and study of the natural world. Growing up, she and her brother had a menagerie of pets from the usual dogs and rabbits to the wilder ones, such as a bat and an owl. Potter is estimated to have had 92 pets over her lifetime; most she made detailed studies of, and many became characters in her books.
Potter knew animals well, as she carefully studied them at home and in nature. For instance, she once stalked a deer just so she could see its expression when it spotted her. In her sketchbooks, Potter made meticulous animal studies, such as one of a mouse she drew scurrying across the page, where she captured its every move.
Naturalism was a common hobby at the time. Potter and her brother filled their schoolroom with all manner of specimens. Fossils, birds’ eggs, and insects such as beetles and butterflies were kept in a collectors cabinet, which is in the exhibition.
The siblings took some of their pets and specimens with them on their long summer vacations in the countryside. For three months each summer, the Potter family leased a house in the country—a common practice of wealthy townsfolk keen to escape the oppressive city smog.
The Potters spent many summers in Scotland, the West Country, and then later in the Lake District (in the far north of England near the Scottish border), where Beatrix drew inspiration from the land. “Potter bundled her pets into boxes and baskets to accompany her on holidays and invariably came home with new friends,” wrote Emma Laws in the exhibition catalog.
Leaving Peter Rabbit Behind
Potter stressed that although she and her brother were both born in London, they were most at home in the northern countryside. Her great grandfather had once owned land in the Lake District, and her family members were of northern descent.She called Hill Top farm with its 17th-century farmhouse “as perfect a place as I’ve ever lived” and Esthwaite Water, a 280-acre natural lake in a glacial valley, as “ultra romantic.” Beatrix reflected that sentiment in a watercolor of Esthwaite Water that’s in the exhibition.
Potter bought Hill Top farm in the Lake District in 1905, the year her fiancé Norman Warne (her publisher’s son) died. But it wasn’t until 1913, when she married local solicitor William Heelis, that she moved permanently to the Lake District, thus fulfilling a long-held dream.
In the Lake District, Potter’s life took a different turn—into sheep farming. Antrobus explained that Beatrix Potter the artist was still very much alive when Beatrix became Mrs. Heelis. But as Beatrix Heelis she can be seen as a Lake District sheep farmer as she worked on preserving local farming traditions and saving the dwindling numbers of Herdwick sheep.
‘The Fairy Caravan’
Despite never leaving the UK, Potter corresponded with her overseas fans, some of whom became her friends.Antrobus explained that Americans often wrote to Potter through “The Horn Book Magazine,” an American publication that she wrote for and where she’d often sell fundraising illustrations to preserve parts of Lake Windmere, England’s longest and largest lake in the Lake District.
Potter believed that Americans had a better appreciation of children’s literature and that they took it more seriously than perhaps people did in the UK, Antrobus said.
A Legacy of Observing Beauty
Potter once wrote that “very few see the beauty of nature.” Potter knew this, as she was one of those few. She did everything she could to capture its detail. Her love of nature was constant throughout her life.Toward the end of her life, Potter wrote: “Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.”
Potter clearly saw beauty, and she made sure that others could see the land she loved and the traditions she held dear by preserving them for generations to come.
For Antrobus, Potter left many legacies, but what stands out for her is Potter’s wish to live the life she wanted to: “I find Beatrix a very courageous person, … not many people would leave behind a comfortable life to pursue a life that would make them truly happy. And that’s what she did.”
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