About the Artwork

THE TALE OF TOM KITTEN published 1907

By the time Beatrix Potter started writing ‘The Tale of Tom Kitten’, she had owned Hill Top for a year.  The expansion of the farmhouse was finished, and Beatrix was enthusiastically planning her cottage garden. She could not completely desert her property for writing, and both the house and garden feature in the story.  Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit leads her children up the garden path to Hill Top’s front door, while inside we see its staircase and bedrooms.  The kittens romp through the garden’s flowers to jump on the wall overlooking Sawrey, and the ducks march across the farmyard. Beatrix used the same kitten as a model for both Miss Moppet and Tom. She dedicated this story to “all Pickles – especially those that get upon my garden wall”.

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.