I have just started reading “The Tale of Beatrix Potter” by Margaret Lane. After spending some time in the garden yesterday badly drawing flowers while Amelia played with shells and buckets of water, I was astonished to see some deft little flower sketches by Beatrix Potter aged 9 in the book. She was obviously naturally very gifted:
“Like most healthy children, she and her brother were not squeamish… They decided to make a collection of all the plants, animals and insects they could find, and smuggled home innumerable beetles, toadstools, dead birds, hedgehogs, frogs, caterpillars and minnows and sloughed snakeskins. If the dead specimen was not past skinning, they skinned it; if it were, they busily boiled it and kept the bones. They even on one occasion, having obtained a dead fox from heaven knows where, skinned and boiled it successfully in secret and articulated the skeleton. And everything that they brought home, they drew and painted. They sewed together little drawing books out of odd sheets of paper and filled them with drawings of birds eggs and, flowers and butterflies… rabbits, cows, sheep, caterpillars, cottages, a leaf or two, a sprig of wallflower, a view of a dairy. Realistic enough for the most part… but here and there on the grubby pages fantasy breaks through – mufflers appear round the necks of newts, rabbits walk upright, skate on ice, carry umbrellas, walk about in bonnets and mantles like Mrs Potter’s.” – page 32-33.
Apart from wondering if you really have to skin and boil animals to be considered a healthy child, I admire the sheer fascination with nature that Beatrix and her brother Bertram, not unlike Leonardo Da Vinci et al, obviously had.
