It’s a truth universally whispered among parents – yet rarely publicly acknowledged – that Beatrix Potter was not very good at telling stories. Her sentences are awkward and knotty. The plots go on and on. The Tale of Peter Rabbit has all the requisite tension and jeopardy, but Squirrel Nutkin is interminable. And if anyone has ever got to the end of Pigling Bland, do let me know.
No, what we love about Potter are her extraordinarily lovely depictions of an enchanted world “peopled” by dapper frogs, fearsome foxes and fusspot hedgehogs, and which, in its anthropomorphic playfulness, seems to evoke something of childhood itself. “Plenty of people can draw,” the artist John Everett Millais told her in 1896, “but you have observation.”
Potter (1866-1943), who grew up in a wealthy Kensington household, spent a lonely childhood observing and immaculately sketching grubs, flowers and her pet rabbits (named Peter and Benjamin). After the Natural History Museum opened down the road, she would while away entire afternoons painting terrapins and the sole of a Roman boot. One lovely drawing depicts – forensically, brilliantly – the scampering movements of a mouse.
This new exhibition breaks little new ground, but it does emphasise Potter’s talent as a scientific illustrator (over and above a storyteller) alongside the impact of landscape and place on her creative imagination.
The first couple of rooms insert the visitor, with some success, inside her hermetical early life, which continued in Kensington for years – Potter didn’t leave the family home until she was well into her forties. One room imagines the nursery she shared with her brother Bertram (who, unlike Potter, was sent away to school), where the two would store birds eggs and shells and pore over dragonfly wings and sheep’s wool.
Her first scrapbook, made at the age of nine, includes painted illustrations of caterpillars accompanied by scientific classifications. Her later scientific watercolours – of privet hawk moths and fungi – were so good they were collected in the 1967 book Wayside and Woodland Fungi.
