To a lot of people, Beatrix Potter means fluffy bunnies and fiddly names like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Jemima Something-or-other. But there are also loads of Beatrix Potter super-fans out there who remember by heart what every rabbit, hedgehog, frog and fox is called. She’s a national treasure, for God’s sake.
Billed as a family-friendly show tracing the story of Potter’s life, the V&A’s new exhibition ‘Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature’, was created in collaboration with the National Trust, from which many of the objects are borrowed. It’s a show about nature, about looking and about the Great British Outdoors. Although Potter spent 47 years living round the corner from the V&A in a Kensington townhouse, London was her ‘unloved’ home. Her family went on a lot of holidays: the exhibition whisks you to Manchester, to Scotland and to the Lake District, where Potter formed a lasting love affair with the turbulent English countryside.
This show doesn’t have the theatricality or immersiveness of some of the V&A’s other blockbusters, like its recent heady ‘Alice in Wonderland’ exhibition and the like, but it’s certainly interesting. There’s an impressive level of detail about how Potter’s drawing skills developed: she’d copy the illustrations on her parent’s pottery, for example. And through trinkets, family photographs, wooden clogs, drawings and letters, we learn that Potter was a hell of a lot more than just a storyteller: she was a sheep farmer, a scientist, an anthropologist and a mycologist. She also wasn’t always as sweet as her books suggest. She sneaked squirrels, salamanders, bats and birds of prey into her house, and boiled her dead pets to study their skeletons. Grim.
The family-friendly element of the show doesn’t hit the mark. There’s stuff for kids to play with here and there – microscopes, a dress-up mirror and a very small reading corner – but it’s very meh and doesn’t feel fully integrated into the story that’s being told. You get the feeling it would be difficult to keep little ones entertained.
Far better are Potter’s sketches, which grow more photorealistic as her personality shifts and she finds her independence as an adult. While there’s not an awful lot about how specific stories were developed, we do learn that her characters are radically accurate, based on her studies of how real animals interact. This chick had an incredibly intimate relationship with nature: she even won prizes for keeping sheep and protected the Lake District from development. At the end of it all, a gleaming portrait emerges. Potter is about a lot more than fiddly names.