Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  There were, however, drawbacks to her fungus hunting. She was often plagued by ticks, once admitting that she had an ‘average of seventy bites, but sometimes beyond counting’. Even her pony objected to the flies. Beatrix wrote to Eric Moore describing how her pony wore a pair of ‘white ear caps’, drawing them to explain how the tassels brushed the flies away. She also drew the sheep wearing little caps that tie under their chins against the fly bites. Always interested in livestock, the condition of the land and the farms, Beatrix wrote, ‘They are such fine sheep & the farmers live in big houses & are very well off. They are carrying the corn now & making stacks. I think I never saw such fine big fields.’54

  But that summer there was the additional problem of her unhappy mother, whom Beatrix now referred to as ‘the enemy’. Ever controlling, Helen often refused to order the carriage in the morning or make up her mind when she wanted it. ‘If I say I should like to go out after lunch,’ Beatrix complained, ‘I am keeping her in, and if she does not go and I have missed the chance of a long drive, it is provoking.’ Beatrix clearly enjoyed her independence at Lennel, but she was also lonely. She had wanted to invite her Hutton cousins, Caroline and Mary, to visit. But Helen refused to allow them, citing the disreputable condition of the one spare bedroom. Beatrix saw this for the convenient excuse it was, writing: ‘I would so very much have liked to have Caroline, and I am afraid they rather expected to be asked,’ confessing to being in a very bad temper at the decision. On her last morning at Lennel, Beatrix reflected that they had been ‘sojourners in a strange land, I with a feeling of not committing myself, and my mother with a most hearty aversion and prejudice to the whole affair’. Hoping that she might return to the Borders someday, perhaps with a more agreeable companion, Beatrix complained, ‘It is somewhat trying to pass a season of enjoyment in the company of persons who are constantly on the outlook for matters of complaint.’55

  The Borders, however, had made an indelible impression and so had her growing personal independence. She loved the little streams she discovered with her pony and cart, noticing that they had ‘no joyous boisterous rush like Highland Burns, but there is a happy peacefulness about them’. The abundant corn, cattle and sheep and the prosperous land seemed a marvel to her — a testament to the few herdsmen and farm labourers that were in evidence. As a hunter of toadstools, she had found a magical realm. ‘I am sure,’ she wrote, ‘driving for miles among these lonely cornfields and deep silent woods, and on the grassy slopes of the still more quiet hills, I have thought the whole countryside belonged to the fairies, and that they come out of the woods by moonlight into the fields and on to the dewy grass beside the streams. There are not many hedgehogs, which are fairy beasts… and how without the aid of the fairy-folk of fosterland could there be so little mildew in the corn?’ The autumn, she noted poetically, was the ‘pleasantest season of the year, none the less pleasant for being the end, as the last breath of sweets is sweetest last’.56

  Her Shakespearean illusion was no accident, as one of her accomplishments at Lennel was committing four acts of Henry VIII to memory. She memorized about six Shakespeare plays that year, repeating them randomly as mental practice, keeping account of her progress in an exercise book. She began this during a period of sleeplessness and depression, discovering that the concentration required to memorize was diverting and provided mental exercise. Beatrix not only loved the language of Shakespeare and the Old Testament, but was fascinated with the mind’s ability to recall something once thoroughly learned.

  Packing up her summer’s treasures, Beatrix was ‘very sorry indeed to come away, with a feeling of not having half worked through the district, but I have done a good summer’s work. The funguses will come up again and the fossils will keep. I hope I may go back again some day when I am an old woman, unless I happen to become a fossil myself, which would save trouble.’ Beatrix could not have known how well the field work she had done in the Borders would prepare her for the scientific challenges that lay ahead, nor how the cadences of Shakespeare would inform her literary perspective.57

  Back in London she was given an unexpected opportunity to draw some Roman and post-Roman artefacts from the Bucklesbury excavations. They were common everyday objects: metal and bone tools, potsherds of various sorts, toilet utensils, craftsmen’s artifacts, needles and fragments of Roman leather sandals. Some had been excavated in 1872 from the silts of the ancient Walbrook stream that ran under the National Safe Deposit Company’s building near Queen Victoria Street in the City of London; others came from the historic Roman settlement at Southwark, south of the River Thames. They were lent to Beatrix through the auspices of a gentleman connected to the NSDC company, in whose collection they belonged. Allowing someone to ‘borrow’ ancient artefacts in order to draw them was a common practice in Victorian times. How long Beatrix kept the objects is not known, but it was long enough to do more than thirty watercolours over the winter of 1894, some of which are among her very finest work in scientific illustration.58

  Now at the height of her powers as an illustrator, she explored these common household articles with an elegantly curious eye. Because she was an amateur interested in archaeology, she arranged her objects on the page with imaginative abandon, mixing types, juxtaposing shapes, exploring the different textures of rust, leather, and metal, giving each a tactile quality, yet drawing them with such accuracy they could almost be photographs. Sir John Millais once made the distinction between those that could merely draw and those whose drawings had ‘the divine spark’ of observation. These paintings have that spark, as well as a pure translucency that marks the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites both on Potter’s palette and use of light. They testify to her discipline and her desire to merge the scientific and the beautiful, revealing the truth of both. Beatrix’s interest in the ordinary archaeological implements of long-ago craftsmen is reminiscent of her earlier delight in the tools carried by the farm folk at the Thanksgiving harvest festival Hardwicke Rawnsley had organized at Wray in 1882. Most of Potter’s art was never far removed from the everyday and the commonplace. Decoration, design and architecture fascinated her as expressions derivative of forms found in nature. Although Beatrix frequently disparages John Ruskin in her journal, his insistence on close observation of nature was also the hallmark of her best work.59

  In the spring of 1895 Beatrix records going twice to Burlington House in London to see an exhibit of ‘things from Silchester’. The excavations of the Roman settlement near the present-day town of Reading had unearthed coins and a good deal of figured Samian pottery. Some was decorated with an attractive running-scroll pattern. Other pieces had unusual human figures similar to those she had seen on pottery shards from the Bucklesbury dig. These she also rendered in exquisite dry-brush technique, highlighting the texture as well as the design.60

  Although quarrymen made her nervous, quarries were nature’s fossil museums. On holiday at Holehird at Windermere in 1895, she bravely climbed Nanny Lane above the village of Troutbeck to collect coral fossils from the Applethwaite beds and at Sour Howes quarry. Two paintings of the coral fossils found at Applethwaite are examples of her extraordinary ability to show dimension, mass and texture. Blessed with an exacting eye and excellent vision, Beatrix painted the beauty of nature unadorned, but her final product is always softened by the aesthetic arrangement on the page.

  Beatrix valued fossils primarily as interesting collections, rather than as objects for systematic study, but she wanted to identify what she found. She wondered once, after a frustrating day in the Natural History Museum, whether ‘geology names the fossils or the fossils geology’. In July 1895 she spent some time with Mrs Hutton’s friend, the elderly fossil enthusiast Mr Lucy, showing him her fossils and her Roman paintings. Beatrix wanted ‘nothing but a little encouragement’, but Lucy was interested only in theoretical problems. He admired her drawings, but admonished her to be more selective in her collecting; advice she rejected outright, defending her catholic taste. ‘I do
not feel under any obligation to confine my attention to a particular formation… I beg to state I intend to pick up everything I find which is not too heavy.’ But after clambering about in a potentially unstable quarry in Swanage a year later, she decided it was ‘better not to expect or worry much about geology…’61

  Beatrix Potter could have become expert in any number of fields of natural science: archaeology, botany, ornithology, mycology, geology or entomology; each held a certain fascination for her. Of all the Victorian passions for natural history, only astronomy failed to attract her, though in Swanage she had been fascinated by the brief flight of a night-time meteor. ‘I was much impressed by it,’ she wrote, ‘a strange visitor from the outside of the world. I do not often consider the stars, they give me a tissick [make me breathless]. It is more than enough that there should be forty thousand named and classified funguses.’ In describing the meteor’s appearance she showed an understanding of the basic laws of physics and both its practical and impractical applications. ‘Force’, she wrote, ‘is said to be interminable. I sometimes reflect what may happen when Peter Rabbit stamps, which is one of the most energetic manifestations of insignificance which has come under my notice.’ She was always fascinated with how things worked and how the specific fitted into the greater whole, crossing academic disciplines with total abandon. In a proclamation of exemplary Victorian self-confidence, she wrote in 1896: ‘With opportunity the world is very interesting.’62

  Beatrix’s skills as a scientific illustrator were given surprising employment in late 1895 when she accepted an unusual commission for twelve entomological lithographs to accompany the science lectures at Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women, then established in the Victoria Theatre (the Old Vic) in a seamy section of the Waterloo Road. The commission came from Caroline Martineau, then the principal of the school, herself a scientist and the author of several science books for children, who had heard of Beatrix’s artistic abilities through her cousin James. Beatrix had rushed to judgement when she had first been introduced to Constance and Caroline Martineau as an 18-year-old. Then she had accompanied her father to visit his old mentor, the Unitarian theologian James Martineau, at his Gordon Square home in Bloomsbury and described Martineau’s spinster cousins as ‘dry and acid to a degree, which is at once startling and amusing’. But time and maturity had altered her opinion. The commission associated her with two remarkable social activists.63

  Caroline was a close friend and associate of Emma Cons, an enterprising reformer who had founded the community restoration project in the old theatre as the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern. By 1889, it had expanded into a part-time educational institution for working men and women. Emma Cons and Caroline Martineau had both been valued lieutenants for the housing reformer Octavia Hill, and both were members of an important group of social activists that gathered loosely around the Christian socialist theologian F. D. Maurice, and P. H. Wicksteed, the pastor at Little Portland Street Chapel, which two generations of Potters had attended. Beatrix’s talents as a science illustrator had been noticed among the Unitarian community. Her commission came out of Caroline’s desire to provide accurate illustrations of insect anatomy to accompany the college entomology lectures.64

  Beatrix appears to have begun work on the lithographs in the autumn of 1895, for the following January she reports studying the entomological ‘Index’ at the National History Museum and looking at the cases of identified insects, ‘being in want of advice’ about labels. Once again she was thoroughly frustrated with the museum. ‘I worked into indignation about that August Institution. It is the quietest place I know — and the most awkward. They have reached such a pitch of propriety that one cannot ask the simplest question… The clerks seem to be all gentlemen and one must not speak to them. If people are forward I can manage them, but if they take the line of being shocked it is perfectly awful to a shy person.’ Ultimately she concluded that ‘the insect-case is nothing but labels and contrasts… an extreme example of museum labelling run mad’. Nothing there could help her design a set of integrated drawings. By June 1896 Beatrix had selected the firm of West, Newman at Hatton Garden to produce the lithographs and took Bertram, who was keenly interested in the project, along with her. She also consulted her former art teacher Miss Cameron. In the end, Beatrix doubted whether her lithographs would be of any educational value.65

  Two surviving lithographs show various anatomical details of a single insect. One illustrates the anatomy of a privet hawk moth: caterpillar, chrysalis, magnified wing scales, and details of the head and legs; the other is a highly magnified sheet web spider, a Linyphia triangularis. In both, different body parts are designated by letters and the levels of magnification are indicated. These extraordinarily effective scientific illustrations reveal that by 1896 Beatrix’s horizons had expanded both scientifically and socially. She was conversant about printing and publishing establishments, and her abilities as an illustrator were more widely appreciated than her journal suggests. It is also clear that by the mid-1890s she knew curators in various departments in both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, had engaged them in conversation and had opinions about their expertise, and that they, in turn, had noticed her artistic ability.66

  Through the Potters’ Unitarian circle Beatrix had also been introduced to Sir William Flower, the director of the Natural History Museum, whom her voluble father engaged in conversation at social occasions at the Pagets, though he had not thought to include his daughter. Initially Beatrix hoped to speak to Flower about her lithographs, as he was a physiologist. She was both irritated and depressed when she failed to get him to recognize her at the museum, and even at the Pagets he did not speak to her. After an ignominious evening there she wrote, ‘I wonder if people know the pleasure they may give a person by a little notice. Not that I think that Sir W. Flower is very [un]kind, but absent minded. He knows me occasionally, but generally not at the Museum, and I always thought perhaps if I happened to meet him at the Paget’s he would speak to me. Must confess to crying after I got home, my father being as usual deplorable.’67

  Rosalind Paget suggested that Flower’s failure to recognize Beatrix at the museum was not indicative of his absent-mindedness, but because she had on a hat. But Beatrix apparently missed her point. Flower was an outspoken conservationist and vehemently against the use of feathers in millinery. He had embarked on a campaign for the conservation of rare birds and Beatrix’s bonnet was undoubtedly stylishly decorated with feathers. ‘I should like to know what is Sir W. Flower’s subject besides ladies’ bonnets,’ Beatrix wrote in frustration, unaware of her offence.68

  It may also have been through the Pagets that Beatrix met Dr Henry Woodward, the leading authority on the Palaeozoic period, who was Keeper of Geology at the British Museum and editor of the Geological Magazine. Woodward, who had four daughters of his own, was more approachable than Flower. Whether or not the two families knew each other at this time, it was undoubtedly Dr Woodward that Beatrix sought out at the museum to help identify her fossils.69

  Sometime around 1894, she met Woodward’s daughter Gertrude, also an artist and scientific illustrator, who was employed part-time at the museum where she drew palaeontological specimens for the museum’s catalogue and for her father’s many publications. Gertrude was roughly five years older than Beatrix, but the two women had much in common and became good friends. Gertrude and Beatrix met quite often at the museum during this period when Beatrix was busily drawing fossils. Gertrude introduced her to her younger sister Alice, also a watercolourist, who had once done scientific renderings, but by 1894 was a successful children’s book illustrator. Given their mutual interests in art, story and publishing, it is unimaginable that children’s books, printers, publishers, paper, paints and techniques of scientific illustration were not topics of conversation whenever Beatrix and the Woodward sisters were together.70

  Perhaps with Alice’s success in mind, in May 1894 Beatrix offered some i
llustrations for a booklet, ‘A Frog he would a-fishing go’, to the firm of fine art printers, Ernest Nister, who had bought a few of her earlier drawings. They were loosely taken from her September 1893 picture letter to Eric Moore about a frog named Jeremy Fisher. Beatrix thought they could be put in a booklet, but was told ‘people do not want frogs now’. However, the firm offered to buy the frogs and several miscellaneous drawings, just in case. Beatrix accepted their offer for the single drawings, but stood firm on a price of 25s. for the frog group. When Nister continued to bargain, she asked for the return of her artwork. Both parties compromised, but Beatrix succeeded in getting her price of 22s. 6d for nine frog drawings. Ultimately they were published to illustrate a set of verses by someone else in one of Nister’s Children’s Annuals called Comical Customers.71

  Throughout the summer holidays of 1895 and 1896 in the Lake District, Beatrix was absorbed in her study of fungi. She was both drawing and photographing them, adding to her growing visual catalogue of various genera and species. Hampers and paintings were posted to Charlie McIntosh in Inver and letters were exchanged regarding identification, environmental conditions and site locations. In 1896 alone, Beatrix made fifty-two fungi drawings, and an increasing number of microscopic studies. Exactly what she planned to do with her fungi paintings at this point is unclear, although her botanical recording alone was both a sufficient and worthwhile objective. She may have had in mind painting a representative sample of fungi, but her collecting and painting was by no means systematic. But certainly she hoped for a practical outcome, perhaps illustrating booklets or even a text on mycology, should she discover some publisher who would buy them. Having money of her own had become increasingly important, both as a symbol of self-worth and as a measure of economic independence. Shortly before a particularly bleak Christmas in 1895 she wrote: ‘One must make out some way. It is something to have a little money to spend on books and to look forward to being independent, though forlorn.’72