Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  Beatrix learned basic reading, writing and arithmetic, studied Latin with real pleasure, was later taught French by a separate tutor, and eventually wrote quite fluently in that language. Her last tutor, Miss Annie Carter, was employed most particularly to teach her German. Beatrix enjoyed ancient history and poetry, treasured the writing of Sir Walter Scott, and delighted in rhymes and vernacular verse. As she got older she saw more of her parents and absorbed current political events, coloured by her father’s conservative political attitudes, and was attentive to the social gossip that he brought home each day from his clubs. But her compulsion to draw intruded everywhere, as in 1883 when at a small dinner party she busily painted a pineapple that was soon to be consumed, barely completing her sketch in time.47

  Her flower paintings of the 1870s and 1880s followed the tradition of Victorian women flower painters who often worked as illustrators of botanical texts and magazines. Some, like Jane Webb Loudon, whose illustrations were published in popular mid-century periodicals like the Ladies’ Magazine of Gardening, mixed botanical illustration with scientific study and instruction. Because flower painting and drawing had long been considered an acceptable female accomplishment, many women artists pursued flower painting as an opportunity to engage in a serious study of botany, even moving into optics and photography. Beatrix also copied out trees, of which she was particularly observant from an early age, zoo animals, exotic plants, birds and fish. Landscapes appear in her earliest sketchbooks, and by 1884 she was painting the rural panorama that unfolded before her at Camfield.48

  Her interests in natural history, science and art coalesced in her menagerie of pet animals, who were the surrogates for the human friends she lacked, as well as the objects of her scientific study. ‘I once had a mouse which must have been cross bred…’ she recalled much later.

  I used to let it run about in the evenings & when I wanted to catch it I flapped a pocket handkcf. in the middle of the room — or rooms — when it would come out & fight, leaping at the hdcf. I think… it was that same mouse which got into trouble with the authorities by biting out a circular hole in a sheet on my bed! I had many mouse friends in my youth. I was always catching & taming mice — the common wild ones are far more intelligent & amusing than the fancy variety.49

  Rabbits were also favourite subjects. She had a pet rabbit at Dalguise and was making serious studies of rabbits by 1880. With the acquisition of Benjamin Bouncer about 1890, and his successor, Peter Piper, she had a model always at hand. Both rabbits were drawn in every imaginable position and attitude. She observed how they rested, how they nested or hibernated, and the characteristics of their play. With her increasing understanding of their behaviour and her growing adeptness with the dry brush, these rabbits were soon lifelike, waiting to be immortalized as ‘Benjamin Bunny’ and ‘Peter Rabbit’. But not before she had absolutely mastered their anatomy and physiognomy.50

  Miss Hammond allotted a generous portion of the school day to drawing and painting, but most of Beatrix’s artistic efforts were unsupervised and she was essentially self-taught. At the age of 10, Beatrix’s sketchbook includes a copy from Mrs Blackburn’s narrative poem The Pipits and a fine copy of ‘Mrs Bond calling the ducks’ from Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Opera, both taken from books in her father’s library. Copying provided discipline and required close observation, both characteristics of her approach to art. From the beginning she laboured over human figures and faces, and never drew them as well as Bertram. Miss Hammond realized that Beatrix had an exceptional gift for drawing and painting, as well as an unusual appreciation of nature and an unusual ability to observe it. In November 1878, when Beatrix was 12, Miss Hammond recommended that the Potters engage a drawing teacher.51

  For the next five years Beatrix took lessons with a Miss Cameron, grateful for the additional opportunity to paint and draw, but with diminishing enthusiasm for instruction. At 13 she sat for the first of two examinations for the Second Grade Art Student’s Certificate, at the Science and Art Department of the Council on Education at the National Art Training School on Exhibition Road. Her first examinations in 1880 were ‘freehand’ and ‘model’, which merited an ‘Excellent’. The following spring, 1881, she completed the examinations in ‘geometry’ and ‘perspective’ with the same assessment. At the end of her lessons with Miss Cameron in 1883 Beatrix acknowledged: ‘I have great reason to be grateful to her, though we were not on particularly good terms for the last good while. I have learnt from her freehand, model, geometry, perspective and a little water-colour flower painting.’ She was then nearly 17 and she had acquired distinctive opinions of her own on what constituted good and bad art; she was particularly appreciative of good draughtsmanship. ‘Painting is an awkward thing to teach except the details of the medium,’ Beatrix reflected. ‘If you and your master are determined to look at nature and art in two different directions you are sure to stick.’52

  Art was a central part of life in the Potter family. They had always been on the periphery of the contemporary art world either as patrons, collectors or practitioners. Rupert occasionally invited Beatrix to accompany him on his visits to Millais’s studio. Millais was careful to include her in their discussions, advising her on how to mix her paints, and took a kindly interest in her progress. Listening to them, Beatrix absorbed some of the problems encountered by a working artist. Rupert, on the other hand, had little understanding of the practical difficulties of painting. From Beatrix’s perspective he could ‘draw very well, but he has hardly attempted water-colour, and never oil’. She credited her father with being a man of good taste and artistic experience, who ‘sees all the failures and not the difficulties’. Beatrix surmised that being around Millais so often ‘would make a man hard on other painters’; ‘other’ included his daughter. ‘It prevents me showing much of my attempts to him, and I lose much by it,’ she confessed. Although Beatrix preferred Millais’s early Pre-Raphaelite work such as Ophelia, his interest and reassurance meant much to her. ‘I shall always have a most affectionate remembrance of Sir John Millais, though unmercifully afraid of him as a child,’ she wrote when she heard of the painter’s death in 1896. ‘He gave me the kindest encouragement with my drawings…’ ‘Plenty of people can draw,’ Millais once told her, ‘but you and my son John have observation.’ It was an encomium she privately cherished for the rest of her life.53

  Acknowledging Beatrix’s obvious ability, Rupert sought recommendations on more advanced instruction for his daughter from a number of friends, including Lady Eastlake, wife of the Director of the National Gallery and President of the Royal Academy, who was a long-standing family friend. Accordingly, Beatrix began a series of twelve expensive twice-weekly painting lessons with an as yet unidentified Mrs A. in the autumn of 1883.54

  Beatrix, sceptical of the enterprise from the beginning, had a decided preference for watercolour rather than oil, but she tried to be open-minded and take advantage of the opportunity, particularly since at Mrs A.’s the pupils would sketch from models and learn various techniques of oil painting. ‘Of course, I shall paint just as I like when not with her,’ Beatrix wrote, with a bravado she did not feel, already nervous that her originality might be somehow compromised.55

  By just the third lesson she confessed: ‘I don’t much like it, which is rather disappointing. Wish it did not cost so much, is the money being thrown away, will it even do me harm?’ She struggled with her guilt at not enjoying the opportunity, but was increasingly frustrated that she could not work on her own. She worried a good deal about the effect that working in oils would have on her watercolour techniques.

  It is a risky thing to copy, shall I catch it? I think and hope my self-will which brings me into so many scrapes will guard me here — but it is tiresome, when you do get some lessons, to be taught in a way you dislike and to have to swallow your feelings out of considerations at home and there. Mrs A is very kind and attentive, hardly letting me do anything… I do wish these drawing lessons were over so that
I could have some peace and sleep of nights.56

  Beatrix’s objections centred primarily on her instructor’s colour palette and technique of underpainting, which she instinctively disliked. But in rebelling against Mrs A.’s methods, Beatrix was challenged to move ahead in her own experiments with light and colour, and to develop her own style. Like many creative people, Beatrix made the most progress when she had something to push against, and on a certain level she recognized this. Lessons with Mrs A. ended at the year’s end with no regrets on Beatrix’s part, and the hope that her parents would drop the idea of any further instruction. By 1883 she was learning far more by visiting galleries and looking at art.57

  Rupert took an active part in Beatrix’s art education and was, if nothing else, exuberant in his opinions of artists and critics. Beatrix was now included in dinner conversation about exhibits and galleries they had seen and the latest trends. The family enjoyed the work of contemporary Aesthetic Movement artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, J. A. M. Whistler and William Holman Hunt. Although Beatrix deferred to her father’s opinions in public, she had definite views of her own and slavishly followed no one. At first she catalogued each exhibit she had seen, writing extensive comments expressive of her iconoclastic point of view. Later she seems only to have noted those she judged particularly good or bad.58

  For some time Rupert Potter had been enthusiastic about the work of the contemporary children’s illustrator Randolph Caldecott. Exactly when he acquired the first three coloured drawings from The Three Jovial Huntsmen (1880) is unknown, but Beatrix enjoyed copying his pictures, unconsciously absorbing his light-toned palette, economy of line and use of white space. Much later she admitted that she had ‘tried in vain’ to copy Caldecott. ‘I have the greatest admiration for his work — a jealous appreciation; for I think that others, whose names are commonly bracketed with his, are not on the same plane at all as artist-illustrators.’59

  The first painter to impress Beatrix, however, was J. M. W. Turner, whose pictures she saw first at Grandmother Leech’s home in Palace Gate. Turner was, in her view, ‘the greatest landscape painter that has ever lived’. In January 1883, at 16, she accompanied her parents to the Winter Exhibition of Old Masters at the Academy. It was an event she had looked forward to with great anticipation and she was not disappointed. ‘I never thought it would be like this,’ she wrote breathlessly afterwards. ‘I never thought there could be such pictures. It is almost too much to see them all at once.’ There were works by Reynolds, Gainsborough and Van Dyck, and paintings from the Dutch, French and Italian schools. She proclaimed Titian’s Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus her favourite. The exhibition ‘raised [her] idea of art’, but it also overwhelmed her. ‘Was rather disheartened at first,’ she confided, ‘but I have got over it.’60

  Beatrix was always interested in the work of other women artists and took particular note of their subject matter and their drawing techniques. She commented approvingly that the paintings by Angelica Kauffmann showed ‘what a woman has done’, and she was favourably impressed with the pictures of Lady Louisa Waterford and Rosa Bonheur.61

  Reading back over her elaborate but somewhat naive exhibition notes several years later at the mature age of 20, she was embarrassed. ‘It is rather appalling to find one was such a goose only three years since.’ But she also reflected with honest pique that ‘it was a singular thing, when I had always shown a taste for drawing, that I should have reached the age of seventeen without being taken to see any collection of pictures [Old Masters]… ‘Her belated introduction at the Winter Exhibition of 1883 nourished a voracious appetite to incorporate what she liked into her own efforts, and to further educate her eye. She made up for lost time by visiting as many exhibitions and galleries as she could. On 3 March she was back at the Academy again. This time the experience seems to have inspired rather than overwhelmed, for she wrote prophetically: ‘I will do something sooner or later.’62

  It was an optimistic boast for one in adolescence. As she endured the mood swings typical of these years, the future seemed bright one moment and dark the next. Like most young women, Beatrix needed a confidante. Much as she loved her younger brother, and close as they were, Bertram at 11 was absorbed with challenges of his own. Beatrix’s role in the family was unsettled as well. She was still close to her father, but in all probability her relationship with her mother was increasingly difficult. Beatrix was not the pliant, conforming daughter that Helen had expected. Without close friendships with other young women her age, Beatrix was left with her pets and her art. But in her journal, in a secret code of her own invention, she poured out her thoughts and observations, both trivial and momentous. For fifteen years, from 1881 to 1897, what we know about Beatrix Potter comes almost exclusively from her private revelations.

  3

  Transitions

  Harking back to a tradition often employed by young ladies to indulge their private feelings, Beatrix began a diary, or journal, sometime about the age of 14 — a time when she had begun to be critical of her life and her parents, and needed a secret outlet. ‘I am up one day and down another,’ Beatrix wrote in the spring of 1883. ‘Have been a long way down today, and now my head feels empty and I am nothing particular. Will things never settle? Is this being grown-up?’ Unlike most young women who have kept diaries, however, Beatrix Potter wrote hers in a cipher of her own devising: one that consisted pretty much of a letter-for-letter substitution, written in an ever smaller and smaller hand, sometimes in ruled exercise books, but just as often on any scrap of paper conveniently to hand.1

  Beatrix seems not to have spoken of her journal in later life, and only one extant letter written five weeks before her death refers to its existence. In it she explains that she was ‘apparently inspired by a united admiration of Boswell & Pepys… When I was young I had already the itch to write, without having any material to write about… I used to write long winded descriptions, hymns(!) and records of conversations in a kind of cipher shorthand, which I am now unable to read even with a magnifying glass.’ From the vantage point of 1943, she regarded her adolescent efforts as ‘exasperating and absurd compositions’. But her later assessment is neither an objective evaluation, nor an honest explanation of her reasons for keeping it.2

  That she had literary pretensions at 14 is certain. Potter was well read and already had an ear for dialogue and dialect. She loved a good story, possessed an idiosyncratic sense of humour, and recognized the virtues of first-hand social commentary. She was also a keen listener, and was becoming politically aware at a time of profound social change in England. Her once Liberal father was, by the mid-1880s, well on his way to becoming an intractable Tory. By 1881 William Ewart Gladstone, the ‘Grand Old Man’ of the Liberal Party, had entered his second term as Prime Minister, the franchise was expanding to include almost all adult males, and questions of Empire, Home Rule for Ireland and trade unionism increasingly disrupted the quietude of proper Victorian households like the Potters’.

  Diarists, especially adolescents, who go to the trouble to write in code do so to keep their thoughts and opinions private. In Beatrix’s case it seems reasonable to conclude that her code writing was at least initially devised against the possibility that her mother might read it. Certainly Helen Potter would have been offended by her daughter’s retelling of family gossip and her expression of independent opinions. By Victorian standards, Potter’s journal is intimate, confessional and rebellious. She expresses her despair over ever finding something useful to do, voices her fears for the future, vents her frustration with her parents, and describes her furtive self-assertions with uninhibited pleasure. ‘No one will read this,’ Beatrix wrote with self-confidence after venturing a scathing criticism of a Michelangelo painting in 1884. She was very nearly correct.3

  Potter’s journal was also an important laboratory for her irrepressible creativity. It served as a literary sketchbook where she could sharpen her eye, improve her story-telling, and even experiment with vario
us forms and styles, in some cases clearly imitating writers she admired like Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen and Fanny Burney. Writing in code had the added benefit of taking much longer and requiring more attention to structure and syntax. It changed the mundane task of reporting what appeared to be rather routine events into a more important, clandestine enterprise. Like the modern obsession with solving crossword puzzles, writing in cipher engaged her mind each day and gave her a secret sense of creative accomplishment.4

  The journal encompassed the years when her vision of the future stretched rather endlessly from boredom to uselessness. It fulfilled a need not only to express herself, but to have something over which she, who was powerless in every other way, exercised absolute control. The journal ends quite abruptly in 1897 when her artistic and intellectual energies were fully engaged, but, even more significantly, when her extended adolescence had ended, and, as an independent adult, she no longer had any emotional need for it.

  Beatrix Potter’s adolescent aversion to change often complicated her life, but it enhanced her powers of observation and her unusually vivid memory of the places she loved. She was always aware of her physical surroundings: the tiniest details of the interiors of houses where she stayed, the old furniture, the arrangement of household spaces, the shapes and forms of farm buildings and the peculiar natural features of the landscape. This acuity was reinforced by her constant sketching so that she distilled the essence of rooms, sheds and gardens into mental images. But places were also important to her emotionally and provided a certain psychic stability in a life that had featured a degree of uprootedness. ‘Home’ for Beatrix was a place in nature and not necessarily coincident with a physical address. As a young girl she endured the family’s springtime perambulations, for however they turned out, she was assured of visits to Camfield, and for fifteen years, the long summers at Dalguise.5