Beatrix Potter remains one of the world's best-selling and best-loved children's authors. She wrote and illustrated 28 books, including 23 Tales that have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. In later life, she became a farmer and sheep breeder and helped protect thousands of acres of land in the Lake District.
Beatrix Potter’s Family And Early Life
Helen Beatrix Potter was born on 28 July 1866 and spent much of the first 47 years of her life at her family's home at 2 Bolton Gardens in Kensington, which was then a semi-rural part of London. The Potter family was well connected. Her paternal grandfather, Edmund, became wealthy through a successful mechanised calico printing works at Dinting Vale in Glossop, Derbyshire, and later became a Liberal MP for Carlisle, while her maternal grandfather, John Leech, was a merchant who inherited a cotton mill at Stalybridge in Cheshire.
The family also had strong artistic interests. Edmund was a co-founder of the Manchester School of Design, while Beatrix's grandmother Jane Leech and her mother Helen were both skilled embroiderers. Helen also enjoyed painting in watercolours, and Beatrix later inherited her grandmother's embroidery copy book and her mother's watercolour paintbox.
Beatrix's father, Rupert, had kept a sketchbook during his youth, filling it with landscapes, studies of nature, caricatures and copies of illustrations, mostly in pen and ink. His principal interest, however, became the new art form of photography. He was elected to the Photographic Society of London in 1869, now known as The Royal Photographic Society.
Rupert was also friendly with the artist Sir John Everett Millais, whose studio was close to the Potter family home. He assisted Millais by supplying photographs of portrait sitters and landscape backgrounds as reference images. Rupert's favourite photographic subject was Beatrix herself, who patiently endured the elaborate arrangements and lengthy exposure times required for photography.
The photographs taken by her father record Beatrix at home in London, on holidays in the countryside, formally with her family and more casually with her pets. She enjoyed accompanying Rupert on photographic expeditions and eventually became an enthusiastic photographer herself. She later inherited one of his old cameras, which she described as an inconveniently heavy object that had been difficult to carry.
Beatrix Potter’s Education And Drawing
Beatrix was educated at home by a governess and was encouraged to draw from an early age. She learned through practice, drawing from nature and copying illustrations, and had kept sketchbooks from at least the age of eight. She later expressed gratitude that her education had been relatively neglected because she believed a more formal education might have reduced some of her originality.
Her brother Bertram shared her enthusiasm for nature and art and later became a professional landscape oil painter and etcher. Together, the children spent hours observing and studying the many pets kept in their schoolroom, including frogs, a tortoise, salamanders, bats, mice and rabbits. They also maintained a collection of insects, shells, birds' eggs, rocks and fossils in a cabinet in the corner of the room.
As a young girl, Beatrix's activities were largely confined to places near her home. She went swimming and visited the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens and the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, while her paternal grandparents had a house near Hyde Park. Holidays offered greater freedom, with visits to relatives and annual trips to Perthshire in Scotland and later the Lake District allowing her to explore the countryside on foot or in a pony-and-trap.
At the age of 18, while staying at Bush Hall in Hertfordshire, Beatrix had her first driving lesson in a small horse-drawn carriage. She liked the experience very much and recorded that she had not yet had any misfortune.
Art Training And The South Kensington Museum
After Bertram went to boarding school, Beatrix continued her education at home by herself. She studied geometry, geography, French and German, as well as Latin poetry. By June 1883, aged 16, she was deliberately making more time for painting, while her parents had arranged drawing lessons for her between November 1878 and May 1883.
Beatrix also took examinations at the National Art Training School attached to the South Kensington Museum, which was later renamed the V&A. Her student work included still-life studies and exercises in design and perspective, produced in a typically formal style. She was doubtful about formal art instruction and questioned whether painting could effectively be taught when teacher and pupil approached nature and art differently.
Twelve oil-painting lessons from an artist known only as 'Mrs A' left her uncertain about the teaching method. In her Journal, Beatrix recorded her dislike of the drawing lessons, particularly the emphasis on smoothness, softness, colour and the lightness of shadows.
Despite her reservations about formal teaching, copying the work of other artists remained part of her informal artistic education. She regularly visited the South Kensington Museum, which was close to her home, and copied paintings by Constable as well as prints that she encountered in the Library.
Beatrix Potter And Her Love Of Nature
Beatrix was deeply impressed when she first gained the opportunity to visit art exhibitions in central London. Her first visit to the Royal Academy Winter exhibition took place in 1883. She continued visiting galleries regularly over the years and recorded critical observations about them in her journal.
During her twenties, Beatrix began studying plants and animals at the Natural History Museum. She also learned to draw what she observed under a microscope. Her interests extended to archaeology and fossils, but from the mid-1880s her principal scientific passion became mycology, the study of fungi.
After ten years of collecting and drawing mushrooms, Beatrix began considering how they reproduced. She experimented with spore germination, made drawings of her observations through a microscope and prepared a paper entitled On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae, referring to gilled fungi. The paper is now lost.
With assistance from her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, Beatrix arranged for the essay to be presented on her behalf at a meeting of The Linnean Society in 1897. As a woman, she was unable to attend the meeting herself.
The Beginning Of Beatrix Potter’s Children’s Books
In 1890, Beatrix received her first illustration commission from the greetings card company Hildesheimer and Faulkner. Her children's books developed in a less planned way from illustrated letters she wrote to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore.
The first of these letters was written to Noel in September 1893 and featured a rabbit named Peter. The following day, Beatrix wrote another letter for Noel's brother Eric about a frog, and later wrote a story about a squirrel for their sister Norah.
Around 1900, Beatrix copied her letter to Noel to create a rough version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and began arranging for her own edition to be printed. In 1902, the publisher Frederick Warne agreed to publish a version containing colour images. It was an immediate success and began a long and successful relationship between Beatrix and the publisher, with two storybooks released each year.
Hill Top Farm And The Lake District
Beatrix's work with Frederick Warne brought her into a close friendship with her editor, Norman Warne. He proposed to her in July 1905, but less than a month later he unexpectedly died from pernicious anaemia. Devastated by his death, Beatrix devoted herself to renovating a new property, Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, close to Esthwaite Water in the Lake District.
For the following eight years, she continued producing one or two new books each year for Warne. At the same time, her attention increasingly turned towards establishing a new life in the Lake District.
In 1909, Beatrix bought another Cumbrian property, Castle Farm, near Hill Top. Through this purchase she met and became friends with the local solicitor William Heelis. After dealing with her parents' objections to her relationship with a country solicitor, Beatrix married William in 1913 and settled permanently in the Lake District at Castle Cottage.
Beatrix Potter As A Farmer And Sheep Breeder
Once settled in the Lake District, Beatrix was able to devote herself more fully to farming. Ten years later, in 1923, she bought the substantial sheep farm Troutbeck Park. She had been introduced to the endangered Herdwick sheep breed by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, one of the founders of the National Trust.
The Herdwick sheep had helped shape the fells through grazing for thousands of years. They were hardy enough to withstand severe winter conditions and had been taught over generations to remain within their particular areas of the unfenced fell. Beatrix employed the shepherd Tom Storey, and the flocks on the farms she managed soon flourished.
Beatrix did not immediately abandon her book work. However, farming demands took up much of her time, while her eyesight was failing. As a result, later works were often assembled from drawings that she had made many years earlier. Her final storybook, The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, was published in 1930.
Beatrix Potter And Land Conservation
Alongside farming, land conservation became another major passion during the later part of Beatrix's life. This interest was also influenced by her friendship with Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley. The income from her book sales enabled her to expand her estate and pursue her ambition of preserving the distinctive landscape and traditional farming methods of the Lake District.
Beatrix's farming and land ownership therefore became closely connected with her desire to protect the landscape around her. Her expanding estate, funded by the success of her books, gave her the means to support the preservation of the Lake District's unique character and its traditional agricultural practices.
Beatrix Potter's life brought together children's books, illustration, nature, scientific study, photography, farming and land conservation. From her early drawing and observations of plants and animals to the creation of Peter Rabbit and her later work in the Lake District, these different interests formed the course of her life. Her books became widely successful, while the income they generated helpedatrix Potter died aged 77 on 22 December 1943. She left 14 farms and more than 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust.
The Lasting Story Of Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter's life brought together children's books, illustration, nature, scientific study, photography, farming and land conservation. From her early drawing and observations of plants and animals to the creation of Peter Rabbit and her later work in the Lake District, these different interests formed the course of her life. Her books became widely successful, while the income they generated helped her pursue farming and the protection of the Lake District landscape.
Beatrix Potter remains closely associated with her distinctive combination of art, nature and the countryside. Her work as an author and illustrator developed alongside her lifelong interests in the natural world, while her later achievements as a farmer, sheep breeder and landowner extended that relationship with nature into conservation.
Do write and share your reflections upon this matter…
0 Comments