Potter's World

As a child, Beatrix Potter was encouraged to draw. She spent many a lonely hour making intricate childhood sketches of animals and plants revealing an early fascination for the natural world which would continue throughout her life.

On family holidays to the Lake District, she would try her hand at landscapes. She was not strictly figurative, however, and her imaginative art featured rabbits that were not complete without bib and tucker and mice that were unfinished until their paws were full of spinning, knitting and sewing.

Beatrix wrote to several children throughout her life often in the form of picture letters. This was how The Tale of Peter Rabbit came to be written.

Although she did not go to school along with her brother did Beatrix was an intelligent and industrious student. Beatrix left a large body of remarkable scientific illustrations on fossils, archaeological finds, mosses and lichens, wild flowers, microscope drawings and, most importantly, fungi, which she donated to the Armitt Trust.