Beatrix Potter
(July 28, 1866 - December 22, 1943) |
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children's books, such as Peter Rabbit Art Work
| Name: |
Beatrix Potter |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
South Kensington, London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality: |
English |
| Birth: |
July 28, 1866 |
| Death: |
December 22, 1943 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
children's books, such as Peter Rabbit |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Author
Illustrator
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Biography
From her teenage years until the age of thirty, Beatrix Potter kept a journal, written in a code deciphered by Leslie Linder (London and New York 1966). The picture of Potter that emerges is of an acerbic and humorous young woman with a keen critical eye. Writing of a visit to the Royal Academy in June 1882 she complained: 'I think on the whole that the Academy is very poor. There are few pictures which are at all striking, and the majority are bad The worst are by members It seems a shame that they can't be kept out'
Although her family had connections with the art world (Millais was a mend), Potter had scant training. She drew with governesses, received an Art Student's Certificate, and had lessons with a female tut" tended by Lady Eastlake. Potter shared her early fascination with the natural world with her brother. A list of packing she made in 1889 in her journal includes, in addition to the normal requirements of a lady of the period {slippers, white petticoat), '2 bird's skeletons'. Potter drew and made watercolor paintings of flora and fauna, fungi, fossils and archaeological finds. Her attempt in 1896 to be accepted as a naturalist artist by the scientific community was unsuccessful, probably owing to her sex, and an awareness of the discrimination faced by women in the arts is likely to have informed the interest in their achievements which runs through her journal. She wrote about reading Lady Eastlake's Five Great Painters in the year of its publication, commenting, 'most interesting book I have seen for this long time'. The work of other animal painters attracted her attention: 'I naturally fell to comparing this and the other Landseer with the great stag picture by Rosa Bonheur, charitably placed in another room-1 think the Landseers come out badly' In awe at an exhibition of old masters held at the Royal Academy in 1883 she wrote: 'I was rather disheartened at first, but I have got over it. That picture by Angelica Kauffmann [sic] is something, it shows what a woman has done.'
According to Margaret Lane in The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter (London and New York 1978), the artist may have been inspired by the work of another woman, Anna Lea Merritt, while working on her first published book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Lane points out the similarity between the composition of Potter's Peter by the Locked Door, and Meritt's Love Locked Out. As Potter had an incisive knowledge of the art world it seems likely, especially given Merritt's high profile following the purchase of her work by the Chantrey Bequest. Peter Rabbit developed from a 'picture letter' Potter had made for the child of her ex-governess. Initially Potter had the book printed privately in 1901, before Frederick Warne and Co. accepted and published it in 1902.
Over the next decade Potter created books featuring a variety of animal characters such as The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle (1905), The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906), and The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930). The Tate Collection has a complete group of her illustrations for The Tailor of Gloucester (1903). Potter's development into an artist-author of children's books may have been motivated by the fact that such work, perceived as relatively insignificant, offered opportunities to women who had no formal art training. Her images, in pen and ink and watercolor, are playful, delicate and animated. But the stories can also be attractively sinister and even violent. We remember the fox's sly seduction of the naive Jemima Puddle-Duck, and the frustrated Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb smashing up the doll's food and burgling their house in The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904). Potter was aware of the commercial aspects of her work, and its educational potential. In Peter Rabbit's Painting Book (1911) children were given a list of essential paint colors, Antwerp blue, Crimson Lake. Gamboge, Sap green, and Burnt sienna' (she later published two further such titles). Potter insisted that her books be small - a scale suitable for children to hold - and affordable. She became concerned that the British market was being flooded by cheap foreign goods, making it difficult to produce a Peter Rabbit doll she had designed and obliging her to have American editions of her work printed in the United States. Deciding to speak out, she designed a poster protesting at the demise of the Camberwell Doll Trade, and wrote and printed leaflets in the period up to the election of 1910.
Potter's period of campaigning was also spurred by her position as a landowner. The enormous success of her books had enabled her to buy a farm in 1905, Hill Top at Sawrey, Westmorland, in the Lake District.
In a pamphlet written five years later she bemoaned the rising land taxes and her own lack of power to register her dissatisfaction; 'I have no vote!' In 1913 Potter married and, although she published several later books, her interests turned increasingly to farming and conservation. Potter's legacy did not only include the work for which she is famous. Her studies of fungi were used to illustrate a book on the subject in 1967. She also left more than 4,000 acres of the Lake District to the National Trust. The exhibition Beatrix Potter and her World, held at the Tate Gallery, London in 1987-8 recognized her work as art, rather than labeling it illustration. And a book by Eileen Jay, Mary Noble and Anne Stevenson Hobbs examined her work as a naturalist (London 1992). |
Samples of Work
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