Rebecca Writes

Ann guessed correctly that the microscopic studies of a ground beetle in last Friday’s mystery artist post were drawn by the author-illustrator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit (and thirty or so other children’s stories), Beatrix Potter. As you may have guessed from the sketches of beetles, Beatrix Potter was a rather unconventional woman.

Although even her upbringing might sound a bit odd to us, for her time and social class, it was probably fairly typical. Her mother and father both inherited a fortune, and her father was a lawyer, but he didn’t have to earn an income, so he didn’t work much. Beatrix lived a rather isolated life, playing only with her younger brother. She had no formal schooling, but was educated at home by governesses, which meant, in Beatrix’s case, that she was mostly left alone to pursue her own interests.

And it’s in her interests that she shows us that she wasn’t an ordinary girl. She and her brother grew up surrounded by animals and plants—dogs, rabbits, frogs, salamanders and more as pets, and large gardens and moors for roaming. They spent their time together studying, sketching, and even dissecting, the birds and animals and insects they found. When I was younger, I didn’t enjoy many of the typical girl activities, either, but little Beatrix Potter took things a lot further than I thought to go. I can’t help but admire her for that.

As she grew into young adulthood, Beatrix’s passion became mycology, the study of fungi. She collected fungi, dissecting, painting, and drawing them. Her hope was that her detailed illustrations would be used in a textbook, but that didn’t happen. She also developed a theory about the germination of mold spores, and her uncle Henry, who was a noted chemist, presented a paper she wrote on this to the Linnaean Society of London. Her theory was rejected out of hand by the all-male society, because, according to every biography I’ve read, she was an amateur and a woman.

But when one door closes, women-of-pluck look for other doors to try. And Beatrix Potter needed to find at least one door that would open and provide her with a little income and some independence from her parents. So she turned an illustrated story she had written in a letter to the child of a former governess (see right) into The Tale of Peter Rabbit. When she couldn’t get her strory published, she published it herself.

It was only then that Frederick Warne decided to publish Peter Rabbit and you know how that worked out for them. Beatrix continued to publish books with Warne’s and used the money to buy her own place, Hill Top Farm, where she set about learning the ins and outs of farming while she continued to sketch the countryside around her, producing works like the one below, and putting together a children’s book or two per year.

Sketch of a Path in Snow (1909)

But that isn’t what you really want to know, is it? You want to know whether Beatrix Potter, solitary, unconventional girl ever found love, true love. Well, she didn’t have an easy road to it. She was engaged to her editor when she was thirty-nine, but he died after a short illness one month later. Beatrix bravely carried on (you knew she would, didn’t you?), writing her little books and adding to her farm properties. That’s no way, you might think, to meet eligible men, but it worked for Beatrix. It was while she was buying up a couple of pieces of land that she met the local solicitor whom she would later marry. Forty-seven years old, she was, but they still had thirty years of happy married life together.

After Beatrix Potter married, she became less author-illustrator and more farm manager. She did one more of her little books, and a few more books were put together from previous sketches and published in the United States. Her new passion was breeding and showing sheep—Herdwicks, to be precise—and she came to be considered an expert in that field, too. She also enjoyed the other pets and animals she kept, and did many of the physical, every day tasks required on the farm, mucking about, making hay and fixing things.

As she grew older, she became known by the local children as a bit of a curmudgeon, hitting little girls, so they said, for swinging on one of her gates. Do you suppose that, having grown up isolated from other children and without children of her own, she liked children more in theory than practice?

When she died at 77 in 1943, Beatrix Potter had 14 farms which she left to the National Trust, so all her land, even now, remains the countryside that she loved.

Let me show you a little more of Beatrix Potter’s work.

Sketch of a Chair and Window

She loved furniture, too. And gardening.

Sketch of an Onion Patch

And we must have at least one picture of Peter Rabbit.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a mystery artist post so we could play the artist guessing game. As a matter of fact, if you’ve come aboard during the last couple of years, you may not even know what I’m talking about because I haven’t featured a mystery artist since I moved to Squarespace.

Here’s how the game goes. I post a work done by a fairly well-known author/illustrator of classic children’s books—a piece that isn’t an illustration for a children’s book—and your job is to guess who the artist is. If no one guesses correctly with the first piece, I keep posting works until someone gets it right.

This first piece and first clue to today’s mystery artist is a microscopic study of a ground beetle.

Now it’s up to you. Who painted it?

Previous mystery artist posts:

1. Wanda Gag
   Who Is the Artist?
   Who Is the Artist? More….
   Wanda Gag, Free to Imagine

2. Virginia Lee Burton
   Who Is the Artist?
   Virginia Lee Burton, Artist at Home

3. William Steig
   Another Mystery Artist
   Mystery Artist Again
   William Steig, the Late and Latest Mystery Artist

4. Louis Slobodkin
   Reprising the Mystery Artist Game
   Another Piece by the Mystery Artist
   Finally Featuring Louis Slobodkin