Over the Hills and Far Away Read online

  Among details of her grandmother’s childhood that found a later parallel in Beatrix’s life was the purchase by Jessy’s father, Abraham Crompton, of a Lake District farmhouse for summer holidays : Holme Ground, near Coniston. Years later, Beatrix was able to locate it from Hill Top, dimly visible on a distant horizon. Eventually she bought the farm herself.

  *

  When Beatrix was six, Nurse McKenzie left, to be replaced by a governess, Florrie Hammond, and the nursery took on the aspect of a schoolroom. In later life, Beatrix claimed that her education had been neglected : not unusually for the time, neither Rupert nor Helen appears seriously to have considered sending their daughter to school. (Helen was sceptical about public schools generally and, save Rupert’s enthusiasm, would not have sent Bertram to Charterhouse.48) The assiduousness with which the Potters restricted Beatrix’s social contact through her childhood and beyond makes their decision doubly unsurprising.

  Beginning with Miss Hammond, Beatrix learnt English, maths, French, history and geography ; in time there would be lessons in Latin and German. Her enjoyment proved uncertain. ‘The rules of geography and grammar are tiresome,’ she noted ; ‘there is no general word to express the feelings I have always entertained towards arithmetic.’ ‘I cannot do the simplest sum right,’ she insisted.49 With a degree of dis-ingenuousness she subsequently claimed to have forgotten every historical date ‘except William the Conqueror 1066’, but she took pleasure in her reading of Virgil.50 Her spelling and punctuation would remain idiosyncratic.

  Miss Hammond understood her charge. Her regime made generous provision for drawing and painting and, in the winter of 1878, she recommended to the Potters that Beatrix receive drawing lessons from a specialist teacher. A Miss Cameron was engaged for ‘freehand, model, geometry, perspective and a little water-colour flower painting’, an arrangement that continued until May 1883.51 Although her relationship with Beatrix deteriorated over time, Miss Cameron’s encouragement, added to Rupert’s, helped guide Beatrix towards subjects for her art. Ditto the inspiration Beatrix drew from her reading, from the delightful mock arcadia of Camfield and the blandishments of Dalguise in its untamed Highland setting.

  Art was a compulsion for Beatrix. ‘I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result,’ she wrote in her journal in October 1884.52 Once, lacking any more absorbing subject (and to her own amusement), she drew the swill bucket. She drew Bertram, rams’ heads, horses eating from nosebags ; she drew cats and kittens, and mice dancing ; she drew ivy clinging to a wall ; she drew the paddle steamer moored at Holyhead. In a cottage in Kent she drew a pewter tankard and the wooden armchair she copied in her illustration to the rhyme ‘How do you do, Mistress Pussy ?’, later included in Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes ; the Tailor of Gloucester sits in front of the fire in the same chair. Her painted sketches included fragments unearthed by excavations – remains of ancient shoes and sandals ; images of three- and ten-spined sticklebacks presented side on and from above ; the fossil of a giant water scorpion. In a study of 1896, she included on the same sheet of drawings images of rabbits, a caterpillar and a moth, an insect’s leg greatly magnified, fungi in cross section and an earthenware pitcher.

  Despite Miss Cameron’s lessons, and subsequent unhappy lessons in oil painting with an unidentified Mrs A., Beatrix largely taught herself ; she pursued her own inclinations. The question of specialising did not arise, for her interests were always clear and her need to paint unflagging. She would pursue her artist’s vocation in tandem with her absorption in natural history to earn for herself, unintentionally, her singular place in history.

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  ‘The irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye’

  Beatrix and her brother Bertram. Despite a six-year age gap, the siblings were devoted to one another, united by their fascination for animals and art.

  ‘I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs Tiggy-winkle!’

  The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, 1905

  BEATRIX WAS FIFTEEN when she recorded her disappointment at the paintings included in the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy. Her chief complaint concerned absence of truth to nature : seagulls that looked ‘uncommonly like ducks’, ‘very queer’ carnations and ‘rather queer’ holly, ‘very small and terribly spotty’ leopards, ‘a slightly deformed pug’.1

  She knew what she was talking about. In 1875, at the age of eight, Beatrix had made a series of notes about moths, butterflies and birds’ eggs. The caterpillar of the tiger moth, she wrote, ‘feeds on the nettle and hawthorn and is found in June they are covered with black, white and red. They are found by road sides and lanes’. Of the drinker moth, she noted, ‘I don’t know what it eats, but I think it is the flowering nettle.’2

  From the first awakening of interest nature was a serious pursuit for Beatrix, based on detailed study : drawing, annotation, record keeping. Following an afternoon’s fishing the summer of her seventeenth birthday, she filled half a diary entry with a description of the respiratory habits of newts : ‘The moment they have parted with the old [air] they breathe rapidly through the nostrils like other reptiles, as may be seen by the rapid palpitation of the throat ; but… the newt having put out the used-up air, draws in fresh by quick respirations through its nostril.’3 Methodically she plotted the stages of the process ; she contrasted it with that of ‘frogs and toads and salamanders’. Her observations led her to a question about frogs : ‘how can frogs stop under water so long as they sometimes do, over half an hour ?’4 In this instance, her naturalist’s curiosity existed independent of any desire to paint the newts that she and Bertram had caught together. She was startled by their size and the noise they made : an unexpected squeak. She noted the apparent incongruity that ‘the British smooth newt does, very rarely, utter an extremely sweet whistling note’.5 Another summer she did undertake a painted study of a male newt, complete with ruffled crest in the mating season. Its belly is carmine-flushed, its body vividly spotted.

  ‘I did so many careful botanical studies in my youth,’ Beatrix remembered in 1921. She prided herself that her approach had been ‘painstaking’ and ‘thorough’.6 Her tally was indeed considerable : she referred to her ‘thousands’ of sketches.7 As a child she supplemented live plant specimens with illustrations copied from primers and, after 1882, John E. Sowerby’s British Wild Flowers, a present from her grandmother. She enjoyed making lists, as if thoroughness were both an aim and an end in itself, like the catalogue of local bird life she itemised on a visit to Hertfordshire in 1883 (the same visit in which she encountered a family called ‘Titmouse’8) and the record of garden birds – including absences – she kept at home in London.9 And one interest led to another. ‘The spirit of enquiry,’ she offered sententiously, ‘leads up a lane which hath no ending.’10

  From lichens she proceeded to geology and fossils. On seaside holidays she collected shells and seaweed ; she trained her opera glasses on seagulls, made forays with Bertram to discover the first primroses, watched fishermen catching crabs in basket cages and, off the coast of Tenby, puffins on an island. She explored quarries, nervous of the quarrymen, and taught herself how to use a cold chisel on the rocks she found there ; on other occasions she came away empty-handed, as at Thief Fold Quarry in the Lake District, in August 1895, when a tip-off about trilobites proved unfounded.11 Back in London, she walked the short distance to the Natural History Museum, visible from the nursery windows ; there, ‘working very industriously’, she made careful drawings of geological specimens.12 She glutted herself on fossils : ‘I intend to pick up everything I find which is not too heavy.’13 From the outset her nature study was marked by obsessiveness and resolve, and an unquenchable thirst ; an elderly cousin called her ‘the busy Bee’.14 For respite there were afternoons with Bertram sailing his model boat in Kensington Gardens, or board games at home, including a game called ‘Go-bang’.15 On warm days she was allowed the use of a dressing room as a makeshift studio for her painting. Pe
rmission rested with her mother.

  Thanks to Rupert’s connection with Millais, Beatrix Potter’s ‘painstaking’, ‘thorough’ and ‘industrious’ apprenticeship as an artist was served in the shadow of Pre-Raphaelitism. Millais’s painting featured among conversational topics in Bolton Gardens. There were meetings with Millais and privileged access to view his latest pictures. Although he alarmed her and she does not appear to have admitted to him her determination to become an artist, Millais talked to Beatrix in a general way about the progress of her drawing or mixing colours. By the time Beatrix was old enough to consider his work dispassionately – taking issue on occasion with both his draughtsmanship and his colouring – Millais had foresworn the radicalism of his early, Pre-Raphaelite manner in favour of something more lucrative : sentimental potboilers and enamelled portraits of plutocrats (the latter in particular provoked Beatrix’s disdain).

  But Beatrix was wholehearted in her admiration for his early paintings. Their impact on her was powerful and lasting. ‘I remember what a great impression those pictures made on me,’ she wrote about Isabella and Mariana, which she first saw when she was fourteen ; ‘they were the first that ever struck me.’16 She particularly admired Millais’s outdoor Shakespearean subjects, Ferdinand and Ariel and Ophelia. She described the latter as ‘one of the most marvellous pictures in the world’.17 The precise natural details in both works – the trees and shrubs and flowers of the riverbanks, even down to broken stems, in Ophelia, and the ‘marvel of perfection in drawing’ of the foliage in Ferdinand and Ariel – delighted her. Beside such clarity, other paintings faded, like Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, viewed on a visit to Oxford when Beatrix was seventeen : ‘The details I was much disappointed with, there is no particularly careful and minute work as in Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite pictures.’18

  A guidebook to the Tate Gallery, published in 1898, claimed that, while working on Ophelia, Millais had been seen ‘applying a magnifying glass to the branch of a tree he was painting, in order to study closely the veins of the leaves’. In spirit it was the very approach Beatrix herself adopted, beginning with microscopic studies at her desk in Bolton Gardens. In a carefully annotated study of branches of sweet bay painted much later, in 1900, she noted the direction of sunlight striking the leaves and the extent of the transparency of leaf veins without sunlight. A desire to understand and to explain nature (an aim common to Victorian amateur scientists) influenced her from early on ; equally important was her dislike of the element of caricature that too often marred the kind of anthropomorphic pictures of animals she began painting in her mid-twenties. ‘When I was young it was still the fashion to admire Pre-Raphaelites,’ she acknowledged in 1943. She drew attention to the Pre-Raphaelites’ ‘meticulous copying of flowers & plants’ and ‘their somewhat niggling but absolutely genuine admiration for copying natural details’ ; ‘the real essence of Pre-Raphaelite art’, she considered, was focus.19 Cecily Parsley’s harvest of cowslips heaped on stone flags, each golden flowerhead scored with darker gold, the embroidered poppies and cornflowers of the Mayor of Gloucester’s waistcoat and the rainbow of pansies, peonies and rhododendrons in Tom Kitten’s garden, all suggest Beatrix’s debt to the minute botanical details of Millais’s early paintings. Until her sight worsened in middle age, close focus and truth to nature were hallmarks of her painting, and she always aimed at accuracy. By contrast, her dislike of Rossetti’s painting, with its dreamlike sensuousness and lush stylisation, arose from a suspicion that artificiality could never be truly beautiful.20 Her work, she asserted in time, ‘succeeded by being absolutely matter-of-fact’.21

  Her diary records Millais calling on Rupert for landscape photographs. Among requests the latter was unable to satisfy were photographs of an apple tree in 1882 for the orchard in Pomona and, two years later, a running stream for An Idyll of 1745.22 Beatrix herself painted from life. Her preliminary sketch survives for Pigling Bland and Alexander’s crossroads, with fingerpost and five-bar gate ; so does her sketch of the garden, dense with snapdragons, in front of Buckle Yeat Cottage, Near Sawrey, in which Duchess reads Ribby’s invitation to tea in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan. She borrowed the china on the Tailor of Gloucester’s dresser from the cobbler’s wife at Near Sawrey and studied details of eighteenth-century dress in the South Kensington Museum.23 In 1909, progress on The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes was held up by Beatrix’s need to visit London Zoo to see for herself a bear at close quarters ; in the same story she modelled Chippy Hackee on a real chipmunk belonging to a cousin.24 Two black Pomeranians posed for Duchess : Beatrix borrowed them for sittings from their owner, Mrs Rogerson, and also photographed the dogs to prove to publishers Frederick Warne & Co. the accuracy of her portrayal.

  From her first efforts, painted at the nursery table, nature and art marched hand in hand. Art provided a means of scrutinising and rationalising the natural world ; nature supplied subjects for Beatrix’s – and Bertram’s – painting. ‘A willow bush,’ Beatrix pronounced at nineteen, ‘is as beautiful as the human form divine’, though, as it happened, notably less challenging to Beatrix, who never mastered drawing the human figure and wisely did her best to avoid including figures in her books.25 Beatrix’s subjects when she and Bertram taught themselves transfer printing included dogs, a horse, a dormouse and a family of rabbits. Eventually she would conclude that, of these, only mice and rabbits lay really firmly within her scope : ‘I can manage to describe little rubbish, like mice and rabbits – dogs, sheep and horses are on a higher level.’26 Horses, like humans, are mostly absent from her work.

  When Bertram went away to prep school at The Grange in Eastbourne in 1883, Beatrix used his microscope to further her study of insects. She taught herself how to prepare slides for the microscope and recorded what she saw with utmost precision, using a dry-brush watercolour technique to outline every gossamer filament. Under highest magnification, she depicted the coloured scales on the wings of tortoiseshell butterflies – bright tesserae like the soft mosaic pattern of Victorian rag rugs ; she painted the segmental legs, the head and thorax of ground beetles and a sheet web spider in all its mottled glory ; a spider crab, ticks, a mite as rosy and rounded as a potato ; damselflies, spiders, ants, a tarantula and the privet hawkmoth. She discovered tiny, transparent organisms in pond water, including water fleas ; she transferred those too to the viewing plate for painting. Her approach was forensic and, with a mixture of determination and ironic self-awareness, she arranged her studies to resemble the plates of scientific handbooks rather than the watercolour musings of a lady amateur.

  As a child, she painted everything from caterpillars to a hippopotamus, omnivorous in her appetite. Over time she specialised : after entomology, paleontology and mycology. Her obsession with fungi, starting in a small way in 1887, resulted in her finding and painting a number of little-known species and, ultimately, a theory – since challenged – about reproduction through spore germination in members of the Agaricineae family. Along the way she completed more than 300 studies of British fungi, several among the finest of her paintings. After her death a selection were chosen to illustrate Walter Findlay’s Wayside & Woodland Fungi.

  Not for Beatrix, then, ‘very queer’ carnations or ‘rather queer’ holly. What she called ‘the careful botanical studies of my youth’ eventually comprised an extensive informal florilegium : wild flowers, including cotton sedge, cuckoo flower, dead nettle, sea lavender and wild yellow balsam ; of garden flowers, dahlias, tiger lilies, pansies, tulips and carnations. Her sketches of foxgloves would be recycled to sinister effect in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck or fringing stiles in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle ; in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, carnations line steps in Mr McGregor’s garden. Exactingness was as much a feature of Beatrix’s character as her parents’. It surfaced first in her painting and afterwards in her approach to her books. It played its part, too, in her fiction – in Tom Titmouse, in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, ‘most terrible particular’ about his ‘little d
icky shirt-fronts’ ; the Miss Goldfinches at The Contented Siskin coffee tavern in The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, with their ‘spotlessly clean’ tables and china ; above all, in the story of that ‘most terribly tidy particular little mouse’, Mrs Tittlemouse, whose life is a study in housewifely punctilio.

  Despite – or because of – their opposition to Beatrix making friends of her own age, Rupert and Helen Potter had fewer objections to pets. Sandy the cairn terrier was succeeded by a spaniel called Spot, acquired at Dalguise. At intervals the children’s nursery resembled a menagerie. A drawing by Beatrix, made in 1885 when she was nineteen, shows a tortoise in front of the fire grate and, on a table close by, two typically tiny Victorian birdcages, each with its feathered prisoner. Adjacent stands a collector’s cabinet like one she had looked for with her parents the previous winter in Mr Cutter’s furniture shop near the British Museum.27 From the moment Bertram was old enough to accompany Beatrix in her searches, the siblings set about cramming its shallow drawers with butterflies, moths and beetles, stones, shells, fossils, even old musket shot. In addition they filled their third-floor rooms with animals, from reptiles to raptors. A robin lacking tail feathers, bought by Beatrix from a pet shop, was a temporary resident. Speedily she returned it to freedom in the flower walk in Kensington Gardens, ‘where it hopped into aucuba laurel with great satisfaction’.28

  In September 1884, Beatrix surprised herself by the pleasure she took in looking after Bertram’s bat, following his return to school : ‘It is a charming little creature, quite tame and apparently happy as long as it has sufficient flies and raw meat.’29 She observed its habits, as she had previously newts’ breathing, and noted the use it made of its legs and its tail. When the bat died, Beatrix followed Bertram’s instructions on how to stuff and preserve it, taking careful measurements in the interests of verisimilitude. Of course she painted it too.