6.7.24 — That Rascally Rabbit
Was Peter Rabbit an environmentalist? Maybe not, but his creator was. Beatrix Potter fought for England’s Lake District as a natural reserve, and she willed her considerable holdings to the National Trust to make it so. To ask the Morgan Library, she had a love of nature since childhood, and it informs the naturalism of her friendly creatures and her art.
An exhibition gets both main galleries, a rarity, through June 9, to recreate what she saw and the home she knew. This is not, the Morgan insists, just for kids. Call it child’s play, if you wish, or call it art, with loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum. 
At the very least, as the show’s title has it, it is “Drawn to Nature.” Potter would have appreciated the gentleness of the pun. Soon after in America, Wanda Gág brings a greater darkness to both children and nature—and I work this together with reports to come on Gág and Walton Ford, another admirer of animals, as a longer review and my latest upload.
As for Peter’s politics, I am not so sure. He does, after all, raid his neighbor’s garden to gobble up as much of it as he can, like a corporate farmer today. Or was he just a rabbit, reclaiming his habitat from human incursion, like a proper environmentalist? Standards back then were different, and Potter, with her brother, collected everything in sight. (They dissected dead animals as well.) She learned from zoos and science museums, counting everything, however humble, as fellow beings and friends.
Potter drew insects and made a particular study of wild mushrooms in watercolor. She could never match the crisp sublimity of John Constable, although she admired him, and an 1850 still life by William Henry Hunt, of a bird’s nest and blossom, stands out from hers for its intricacy and color. Still, her mushrooms seem almost to tremble, and that, too, suggests her closeness to what she observed. Her landscapes stop short of Constable’s clouds, in favor of the land before her eyes. When she does cut loose, it is for the middle distance, a place to which she could belong. She reserves her most startling color and perspective for a valley or a garden path.
Her brush leaves its mark back and forth in gray, for ripples beneath a boat on otherwise placid waters. This is nature, but inhabited by insects, animals, and humans alike. It is also, sure enough, a lake. Potter might seem an unlikely naturalist. Born in 1866, she grew up in and around London, but she relished vacations in Scotland and summers in the Lake District, to which she dreamed of returning for good. She got her wish at last with a late marriage and increasing income from children’s books and their merchandising, which she took the lead in developing.
She called the property Hill Top Farm, which itself sounds like a children’s book, but this was hilly country in fiction and in fact. She also took farming seriously, like everything else. She managed flocks of sheep personally, just as she insisted on miniature or folding books and designed her own end papers. The family made its money from the textile business, which may have influenced her close care in such things as bedspreads and wallpaper. The Morgan places related photos and sketches within quaint walls to convey their intimacy. She grew up with Wedgewood pottery as well.
She was always a proper Victorian, from a childhood that John Singer Sargent might have painted to her death in 1943. That includes her faith in science, which her family encouraged with the gift of a pocket microscope. An uncle, a chemist, introduced her to a Bunsen burner. It also includes the moral basis of her stories. Engaging as he is, Peter never makes it home from his trespasses without losing his clothes or gaining a whipping. They were nice clothes at that, down to a gentleman’s blue coat and shoes.
Still, Potter took comfort in his human impulses and gave comfort as well. The first of her books came out in 1902, but it had its origins in a “picture letter” nineteen years earlier to a sick child. There is no getting around, too, a serious case of the cutes, but such was her calling. From the moment her brush turns to warm-blooded animals, the faces get shyer and more endearing, even as they acquire more closely observed fur. But then, to her credit, Peter grows older over the course of the books, and one can excuse him and his cousin, Benjamin Bunny, for their place between species. When they head off to scavenge for goodies, they, too, are drawn to nature.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.