The art of Beatrix Potter

‘I will do something sooner or later,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in the secret diary she kept in a private code. 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. She did not identify the ‘something’ she had in mind, but it almost certainly referred to art. Although a painting by Angelica Kauffman stiffened her resolve and bolstered her confidence, the statement was one of intent above conviction. ‘It shows what a woman has done,’ she reassured herself. 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. In both cases the subjects of Potter’s art were rabbits.