Rupert Potter (1832-1914), father of the children's writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter (1866-1943), took up photography in the 1860s when it was still a relatively new art form. An enthusiastic and skilled amateur, he was elected to the Photographic Society of London in 1869 and later contributed to photographic exhibitions. Rupert assisted the artist Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), a close friend, by photographing backgrounds for paintings and sitters for portraits. His favourite subject, however, was Beatrix herself and his prolific legacy of several hundred photographs forms a broad pictorial account of her life from infancy to marriage.

Rupert was also a skilled landscape photographer. During the Potter family's extended summer holidays to the countryside it was Beatrix's delight to accompany her father on photographic expeditions. He photographed in particular the countryside around Eastwood in Dunkeld, Wray Castle near Ambleside, Lingholm on the edge of Derwentwater and Tenby in Pembrokeshire. The Potters also made frequent visits to Herfordshire and to the West Country. This photograph depicts the west front of Salisbury Cathedral, visited by the Potter family in April 1895.

Excited by the possibilities of the new art form, Beatrix too became an avid photographer, inheriting one of her father’s old cameras, 'a most inconveniently heavy article which he refuses to use, and which has been breaking my back since I took to that profession.' (Journal, Friday 19th April 1895). Beatrix went on to employ photography in the service of her own art and, like Millais, she photographed details, particularly in the Lake District landscapes, that she later incorporated in her imaginative book illustrations.