Beatrix Potter's Art: A Selection of Paintings and Drawings
by Anne Stevenson Hobbs
Buy on AmazonThere’s a good long introduction in this book which talks about the development of Potter’s art, with quite technical explanations of her drawing and painting technique, as well as discussion on her influences and her subject matter. And it is beautifully produced and illustrated. But the reason I chose a book about her art as one of the five books is that in order to understand Beatrix Potter, it’s very important to realize that she is so much more than just the little books. Anne’s book has examples of her very early art, what she saw on her holidays in Scotland as a child, through her teenage years when her work is a bit more stylized and we know that she belonged to a drawing society and took diploma exams. Everything is a bit more formal. Several still lifes, for example, are a bit stiff. But Potter was also experimenting with fantasy drawings, illustrating fairy tales, rhymes and fables from a young age, and some of those are lovely. Then, in the 1890s, she made a bit of money from selling designs to companies that made greetings cards. “It’s possible to follow the trajectory of her life in rather the same way as you would with a biography, but looking at it visually through her own work.” But all the time she was sketching, and this book also shows that very well—the pages and pages of sketches of rabbits, mice, birds and frogs (most of them her own pets) and of flowers and landscapes. She’s always sketching and so later, when she came to produce the little books (which, of course, are also illustrated in this book), you can see that the illustrations are based on years of observation and drawing. That’s what makes them so accurate. Later on in her life she painted some wonderful, impressionistic watercolour landscapes of the Lake District in and around the village where she lived. These are amongst my favourites. Another very important thing to mention about this book—already touched on in relation to Linda Lear’s biography—is that it shows Beatrix Potter as a natural historian and scientist. In addition to all the sketches of animals and the later landscapes, there are very detailed botanical paintings of flowers, mosses and lichens. And there are the absolutely fantastic fungi paintings. There are several hundred of those and most of them are in the Armitt Library and Museum in the Lake District, while others are in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery. They are a surprise to the majority of people, who know only about Beatrix Potter’s little books, or her connection with the National Trust and her role in the Lake District. Fewer people know about the time in her life when she was making these meticulous, accurate drawings and paintings. And so all these different aspects of Beatrix Potter are contained in this one book about her art, and with the introduction and the captions it’s possible to follow the trajectory of her life in rather the same way as you would with a biography, but looking at it visually through her own work. Some of that work is absolutely beautiful. Yes, it did. She was not only very interested and very good at studying fungi, but also became a bit obsessed by it. She believed she had discovered something about the symbiotic relationship between lichens and fungi. I can’t explain it to you perfectly because I am not a scientist, but Linda Lear’s book is very good on this. Potter did some research at Kew Gardens and at the Natural History Museum and she set up her own little laboratory in the basement of the Potters’ house. Supported by her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, she presented her paper, “On the germination of the spores of Agaricineae” , to the Linnean Society in London. “At one stage, she had thought she might be able to make money as a scientist” There are various views about what happened next. The paper was read on her behalf by one of the scientists from Kew Gardens, because women were not admitted to Society meetings. Some sources say that the paper was rejected. But it wasn’t actually rejected out of hand—it was sent back requiring ‘more work’, which was not an uncommon response. People have been quick to say that it was rejected because she was a woman and an amateur and the Linnean Society has been rather vilified as a result. I actually don’t believe that that is quite what happened. I think the members simply asked her to do more work on it, though her sex and lack of training might have had something to do with the way the request was presented. Anyway, for whatever reason, she lost interest, maybe her confidence was dented, or she felt she had been rejected. We don’t know. The paper itself is lost and so are any comments about it, or she didn’t write them down. And it’s clear that her interest in fungi faded away after that and she became more interested in making money from her little books. I think that, at one stage, she had thought she might be able to make money as a scientist. It became clear to her that she wasn’t going to be able to and she did need to make money. So, she had to look for another way. I think that is probably the simplest way of describing what happened. There are a few oil paintings, but they are mostly early. She preferred watercolour. Her brother Bertram was quite an accomplished artist and he did paint in oils, but that wasn’t a medium she enjoyed. Her work is nearly all pencil, watercolour or pen and ink.