This 1904 drawing is assumed to be of Potters pet hedgehog Mrs. Tiggy.
DOWN THE GARDEN PATHA sketch from Beatrix Potter’s archive.
The writer and illustrator, age 15, with her cherished spaniel Spot
A 21-year-old Potter’s drawings of a ground beetle. She had closely observed animals since she was a child, filling sketchbooks with the small creatures she smuggled into her London home—among them hedgehogs, squirrels, spiders, snails, bumblebees, and beetles—and keeping a collector’s cabinet of various specimens.
This 1904 drawing is assumed to be of Potter’s pet hedgehog Mrs. Tiggy. The laundress in her 1905 bookThe Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winklewas inspired by her family’s washerwoman on holidays in Scotland; that tale, like others, was composed for real children in her life.
Some 20 years after she made this 1909 painting of Monk Coniston Moor, Potter bought the 5,000-acre Monk Coniston estate—which includes the stunning mountain lake Tarn Hows (one of the most beloved features of the Lake District) and several important farms—to save it from possibly becoming a housing development. She bequeathed the entire parcel to the National Trust upon her death in 1943, a transformational act of Lake District preservation.
