When she was 16, her cousin Kate was painted by a then-popular artist named Briton Rivière, standing in front of a tall cupboard, preparing to feed two dogs. ZUMA PressĮven as a teenager, Beatrix could be caustic in her appraisal of other people’s art, especially when their renderings of plants and animals weren’t up to her exacting standards. (She did receive some formal instruction, but found her teachers annoying, preferring to refine her style on her own.) Beatrix Potter in about 1905 at her farm Hill Top. His daughter was a fan of Millais’ early work, considering his painting of Shakespeare’s Ophelia drowning in a river “one of the most marvelous pictures in the world.” Though Beatrix did not discuss her artistic ambitions with him in much detail, he seems to have seen her drawings at some point and offered broad encouragement. Rupert Potter was an avid photographer, and friendly with the renowned painter John Everett Millais. She developed outlets to cope with that smothering, from her early passion for drawing to her large collection of pets, and that eventually enabled her to create her own life as a writer and artist. In his new book, “ Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter,” Matthew Dennison delves into the beloved children’s book author’s stifling relationship with her parents, who kept her with them well into her adulthood and even objected to her getting engaged when she was nearly 39. When she was 9 years old, she was already drawing rabbits that stood on their hind legs, wore clothes and fiddled with their umbrellas. The family would spend time each summer at Dalguise, a Scottish estate where young Beatrix could indulge her love of nature, which expressed itself through art. Her closest companion, well into adolescence, was her brother Walter Bertram, six years younger. She grew up in a fashionable house in southwest London, kept apart from children her own age except for occasional visits with a handful of cousins. But these icons of children’s literature were shaped under less than joyous conditions, by a lonely young woman who almost never left home.īeatrix Potter was born in 1866, the first child to a London barrister and the heiress to a cotton fortune. For more than a century, characters like Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Samuel Whiskers have brought joy to boys and girls around the world.
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