Beatrix Potter, scientific illustrator

Magazine Antiques, June, 1996 by Robert McCracken Peck

To the eighty thousand visitors who traipse through the tiny cottage annually - some from as far away as Japan - Hill Top represents a nostalgic return to the comforting childhood world of Jemima Puddle-Duck, Squirrel Nutkin, and the many other animals whose adventurous lives filled the pages of Potter's books. Although it is Peter Rabbit with whom most associate the cottage and its one-time owner, Potter created Peter long before she moved to the country. Inspired by a real rabbit of the same name, Peter Rabbit's fictional character was born in a letter Potter wrote in 1893 to the five-year-old son of her friend and former German teacher, Annie Carter Moore. It was the very lack of news that inspired the extraordinary content of her letter. "My dear Noel, I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were - Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand bank under a big fir tree...."(1) So enthralling was the tale that followed, and so beguiling the sketches that accompanied the text, that Noel Moore put the letter away to read again and again. Seven years later Potter asked him if she could borrow the letter, and just before Christmas 1901 The Tale of Peter Rabbit first appeared in print. The simple but endearing story of a mischievous young rabbit's adventures in a forbidden British garden brought Potter lasting literary fame. Since translated into more than a dozen languages, from Afrikaans to Japanese, it may well be the most popular children's story of all time.(2)

Largely overshadowed by her success as a children's writer was Potter's extraordinary talent as a wildlife artist and illustrator. Had she been born a century later her outstanding abilities might have sustained a career in natural science. Potter, however, was the product of an age when few women were taken seriously as thinkers or encouraged to engage in any activity with professional intent.(3) Overlooked, ignored, or rejected by the scientific establishment of her day, Potter eventually gave up her inspired observations and renderings of the natural world in favor of the more acceptable anthropomorphic creatures for which she is now remembered. Only in recent years have her talents as a scientific illustrator begun to receive the recognition they deserve.(4)

Best known for the joy she has given children, Potter, ironically, had a childhood that was anything but joyful. The only daughter of an excessively strict and overly somber upper-middle-class Victorian family, she was raised by governesses in virtual isolation from the outside world. Unlike her younger brother Bertram (1872-1918), who provided brief companionship before being sent away to boarding school, Potter never went to school.(5) Her mother, convinced that Potter had a delicate constitution, permitted her few friends, few activities, and no sports. One of the very few places in London she was allowed to visit alone as an adolescent was what is today the Natural History Museum, a few blocks from the Potters' proper but cheerless house in South Kensington, London. The only other time she was freed from the confines of her third-floor room was during the family's extended summer holidays in Scotland or in England's ruggedly beautiful Lake District. Whether in the museum or in the countryside, nature became synonymous with freedom, so it is small wonder that throughout her life Potter focused so much of her creativity on examining the natural world.

Beginning at the age of five, Potter kept her own zoo in the nursery. The menagerie included a green frog named Punch; two lizards, Toby and Judy; some water newts; Sally, a ring-necked snake; minnows; a dormouse named Xarifa; two house mice, Hunca Munca and Thomas Thumb, whom the butler had caught in the kitchen; birds; bats; a family of snails; guinea pigs; a hedgehog named Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle; and her favorites, a succession of rabbits that included Benjamin Bouncer and Peter, whose antics she even-really immortalized with pen and brush.(6)

These animals provided companionship and were the objects of her minute attention. At the age of nine she recorded the feeding habits of caterpillars in her journal. Surprised to hear her newts squeak, she studied their breathing system to find out how they made the sound. She followed this experiment with a comparative study on the breathing system of frogs. She also recorded the hibernation patterns of her hedgehog. In her journal she deliberated on the comparative evolution of fossil plants and fungi, and noted every detail of her rabbits' behavior. Periodically she measured each of her pets, recording the statistics in a notebook. In 1888 she submitted a letter to the London Times about the habits of hawfinches.(7) When her pets died, she sometimes boiled off the skin and flesh to study and sketch their bones.(8)

From a very early age Porter taught herself to draw by copying illustrations from books in her library. With some basic art training from her governess and mild encouragement from the Victorian portraitist Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), a family friend, she drew all the natural objects she could find. She began with her pets, sketching them in different positions and at various distances and levels of magnification. She collected, studied, and drew shells, fossils, deer antlers, dead fish, bird eggs, flowers, spiders, caterpillars, and bats. In her diary she wrote: