Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) is one of the world's best-loved children's authors and illustrators. She wrote the majority of the twenty-three Original Peter Rabbit Books between 1901 and 1913. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Frederick Warne, 1902) is her most famous and best-loved tale.

The main sketch on this sheet is a preparatory study for Potter’s series of drawings ‘A Frog He Would a-Fishing Go’, in particular the illustration ‘The frog goes fishing’. Potter has also sketched a rabbit licking its paw in the upper right-hand corner of the sheet.

Potter’s illustrations for ‘A Frog He Would a-Fishing Go’ were inspired by the gentleman frog in Randolph Caldecott’s picture book, A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go, printed by Edmund Evans for George Routledge in 1883 and later for Frederick Warne in 1895. In February 1884, Rupert Potter, Beatrix’s father, purchased two pen and ink drawings by Caldecott made in preparation for this book. Beatrix Potter intended her drawings for A Frog He Would a-Fishing Go to be published as a booklet, however, having approached the firm of Ernest Nister was told ‘I am a little doubtful of whether we can take it, we certainly cannot make a booklet of it as people do not want frogs now. The only way in which we could use it would be as a double page in our ‘Annual’…’ Following some negotiation, most of the drawings were purchased by Ernest Nister for publication; in 1896 they were published in Nister’s Holiday Annual and in Comical Customers at the New Stores of Comical Rhymes and Stories.

The story eventually developed into The Tale of Jeremy Fisher, which was published by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1906.