About the Artwork

THE TAILOR OF GLOUCESTER published 1903

’The Tailor of Gloucester’ was Beatrix Potter’s own favourite among all her books. She first heard the true story on which it is based when visiting her cousin, Caroline Hutton, who lived near Gloucester. Leaving an unfinished waistcoat for the Mayor of Gloucester in his shop one Saturday morning, a tailor was amazed to find it ready on Monday, except for one buttonhole, for which there was “no more twist”. In reality, his two assistants had secretly completed the job, but Beatrix Potter has the work finished by little brown mice. She adds an extra note of enchantment by setting the story on Christmas Eve, when animals can talk, and weaving in many of her favourite traditional rhymes. The book was dedicated to Freda Moore, a daughter of her former governess “because you are fond of fairy-tales, and have been ill.”

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.