Beatrix Potter

I grew up with Beatrix Potter and, to this day, I still find that her work offers a certain sense of comfort and nostalgia. I find it inspiring that she allowed herself to be absorbed by the nature surrounding her, whether she was in her back garden or lost in the countryside, making intricate sketches of wildlife, wild flowers, moss, lichens, fungi and fossils. We both share a fascination for the natural world. 

Potter’s extraordinary flair for storytelling distinguishes her from many other children’s book illustrators of the ‘golden age’ (such as Randolph Caldecott) who, rather than writing their own stories, illustrated traditional fairy and folk tales, fables and nursery rhymes. Text and illustration are equal components in Beatrix’s stories. She paid great attention not only to the precise meanings and sounds of individual words but also to their physical appearance on the page.

Her animal characters endowed human emotion and habit that compliment the animals' nature, rather than counter it. It is this absolute familiarity with the way a rabbit stands and sniffs the air or a cat stiffens on hearing a sudden sound that accounts for the success of Potter's animal stories, or "little books" as she liked to call them. Dressing a rabbit in a coat and making it walk on hind legs is not guaranteed to be charming or even particularly interesting. What Potter managed to do was meld animal musculature and movement with its human counterpart, so that she makes it seem possible and even probable for a mouse to thread a needle, for a cat to tuck its babies up in bed or a rabbit to fold a snowy umbrella as it enters a cottage for a Christmas party.

One of the most essential elements to Beatrix's unique realist style is her power of observation. Acutely observed detail in elegant compositions combined with playful washes of watercolour became Potter’s iconic style. The texture of her watercolour was achieved with half pans, using a soft layer in the background and applying more layers of colour to the foreground. Once the paint has completely dried, Beatrix would use pen and ink for line work and detail, to create an illustration that is visually inviting yet clinically exact. Light greens and mauves soon became recognisable as the Potter palette.

Although she died in 1943, Beatrix Potter is still one of the world's best-selling children's authors, loved by people of all ages. She wrote and illustrated a total of 28 books, including the 23 Tales, the 'little books' that have been translated into more than 35 languages and sold over 100 million copies.