About the Artwork

THE TALE OF TWO BAD MICE published 1904

‘The Tale of Two Bad Mice’ was written at a particularly happy time for Beatrix Potter: she and her editor, Norman Warne, were becoming firm friends, and Beatrix was sometimes included in Warne family celebrations.  Norman made a new cage for Beatrix’s pet mice, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, so that she could more easily draw them for her new book.  He had also made a doll’s house for his favourite niece, Winifred, and Beatrix was invited to visit and sketch this too.  However, her mother objected, and so Beatrix had to make do with photographs and examples of doll’s furniture and food that Norman sent her.  She kept some of the furniture all her life, and it can still be seen at Hill Top, her first Lakeland home.

Beatrix Potter dedicated the book to Winifred, “For W.M.L.W., the little girl who had the doll’s house.”

About the Artist

Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866 and grew up living the conventionally sheltered life of a Victorian girl in a well-to-do household. She was educated at home by a governess with her brother Bertram.  Her constant companions were the pet animal she kept which she enjoyed studying and sketching.  On summer holidays she delighted in exploring the countryside and learning about plants and animals from her own observations. Beatrix Potter devoted most of her energy to the study of natural history – archaeology, geology, entomology and, especially, mycology. Fungi appealed to Potter’s imagination, both for their evanescent habits and for their coloration. Encouraged by Charles McIntosh, a revered Scottish naturalist, to make her fungi drawings more technically accurate, Potter not only produced beautiful watercolours, but also became an adept scientific illustrator. By 1896 Beatrix Potter had developed her own theory of how fungi spores reproduced and wrote a paper, ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae‘. This was presented to a meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 April 1897 by one of the mycologists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, since women could not attend Society meetings. Her paper has since been lost. Beatrix Potter’s career as a children’s illustrator and storyteller began when The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published by Frederick Warne and Co. in 1902.  The public loved it as soon as it appeared and Beatrix went on to produce on average two books a year until 1910.