![]() ![]() ![]() ‘We have no hesitation in calling her pencil perfect,’ wrote the Times Literary Supplement in 1904. Potter is unusual among British artists and illustrators in the perennial popularity of her work and enduring critical acknowledgment of its value. Towards the end of her life she suggested that the impulses to paint and to write were coeval: ‘I do not remember a time when I did not try to invent pictures and make fairy-tales - amongst the wild flowers, the animals, trees and mosses and fungi - all the thousand common objects of the countryside.’ The measure of the best of her paintings is their impact when viewed without their familiar accompanying text. Much of Potter’s art has a narrative quality - appropriately, given how many of her paintings (whatever their original purpose) ultimately illustrated her stories for children. In the many hundreds of watercolour paintings she completed before her eyesight began to worsen in middle age, she balanced romance with an unaffected sincerity born of her lifelong excitement in the natural world. ‘Everything was romantic in my imagination,’ Potter once wrote. As in the animal paintings of Landseer, albeit Potter’s work as storybook illustration lacked Landseer’s instinct to grandeur, her vision of English wildlife included both heroism and poetry. ![]() Although privately she sometimes tired of rabbits, she remained loyal on the printed page. Like Jane Austen, whom she admired, Potter confined herself to a narrow canvas. Potter stood her rabbits on two legs, she provided them with clothes, handkerchiefs, teapots and, in the case of old Mr Bunny, a sharp little switch, but unlike earlier illustrators she insisted that they remain rabbits, her chief focus anatomies that were very different from the human figure (which she never fully mastered). to describe her as ‘Author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, &c’ on the title page of subsequent stories. The astonishing, instantaneous success of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published in 1902, encouraged publishers Frederick Warne & Co. Rabbits overwhelm the posthumous reputation of Beatrix Potter, who was born 150 years ago next year. In both cases the subjects of Potter’s art were rabbits. By the end of the decade she had made good her promise: her first Christmas card designs were published by Hildesheimer & Faulkner in 1890 in the same year her illustrations to doggerel by Frederic Weatherly marked her first sortie into print. ‘It shows what a woman has done,’ she reassured herself. Although a painting by Angelica Kauffman stiffened her resolve and bolstered her confidence, the statement was one of intent above conviction. She did not identify the ‘something’ she had in mind, but it almost certainly referred to art. It was March 1883 and 16-year-old Potter, still mostly confined to the nursery of her parents’ house in South Kensington, had made a second visit to the Winter Exhibition of old masters at the Royal Academy. ‘I will do something sooner or later,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in the secret diary she kept in a private code. ![]()
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