Book traces broad talents of ‘Peter Rabbit’ author Beatrix Potter
Generations of readers have loved Beatrix Potter’s books, yet few people have given much thought to the woman who wrote and illustrated them.
Who was Beatrix Potter?
Perhaps a proper young Victorian who rambled the English countryside in her country tweeds with her watercolor kit, waiting for inspiration to strike.
Seattle writer Emily Zach’s new book — “The Art of Beatrix Potter,” a collection of Potter’s life’s work — shows that she was far more than a 19th-century weekend painter.
Potter was an artist of astonishing range. She composed accurate illustrations of the natural world and its creatures, from mushrooms and lizards to her beloved bunnies. She painted beautiful landscapes. Her architectural drawings revealed grace, proportion and scale.
She used all her talents in the service of her creations — Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Mrs. Tiggy-winkle the Hedgehog and Jeremy Fisher the Frog, to name a few of the cast of creatures who inhabit her 30 books.
One Potter book alone — “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” — has sold an estimated 45 million copies worldwide.
Zach, 26, worked for a books packager, spending years doing photo research and negotiating rights for the use of images. Zach thought she had a great job. Then she got a better one.
When San Francisco publisher Chronicle Books decided to mark the 150th anniversary of Potter’s birth with a book, they put Zach to work researching images. That involved satisfying detective work — contacting museums, mostly in England, in search of Potter’s art.
Eventually, Zach also was asked to write the book; with the exception of some essays by Potter experts, she wrote all the text.
Zach, who now works as a production editor and photo researcher, talked about her subject and inspiration.
Q: You organized the book according to the different parts of the U.K. that provided Potter with inspiration — Scotland, the Lake District, Wales. How did that come about?
A: I was contacting museums that have collections of her art, looking for exciting things that people hadn’t seen before. I realized that her family went on holiday, sometimes for as long as nine months out of the year, and that it was at those locations that she did a lot of her art. I thought that would be a really interesting way to organize it.
Q: She came from a privileged background, but she was no dilettante — she showed enormous talent and drive early on. What did her parents do to encourage her?
A: Her father definitely encouraged her. Both her parents did, but he was a photographer in his spare time. He would take her with him on his photography expeditions. I think she picked up a sense of composition and observation from those trips.
They also brought art instructors into her home.
Q: She was an animal lover. She rescued and tamed two mice; she had her own hedgehog. She even kept frogs, the inspiration for her Jeremy Fisher character.
A: When she was a child, they (Potter and her brother) kept cages for their animals in their schoolroom, tucked away in the nooks and crannies. The parents and the rest of her household might not have been aware of how many there were.
There was a lizard named Judy. There was her own Benjamin Bunny — she had him for a week before people noticed. She spent most of her time in this room, a nursery that became her schoolroom that eventually became her scientific laboratory.
Q: She was an early self-publisher — she paid to have “Peter Rabbit” printed before a publisher picked it up. And then it sold 56,000 copies within a year of its publication.
A: She had been sending sketches and ideas to a few different publishers; she had shopped “Peter Rabbit” around. She had very specific ideas about what she wanted … she didn’t want them to be too expensive for kids. The original run (200-300 copies) was in black-and-white because of the expense (of printing color). She gave them away for Christmas presents. Warne (Frederick Warne, her eventual publisher) pointed out to her that they could do color more inexpensively because of advances in technology.
Source link
