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.

In the 1890s Potter sketched illustrations for fairy tales including Cinderella, Puss-in-Boots, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty. Her later idea to publish her ‘more or less written’ version of Cinderella within ‘a set of fairy tales in thin volumes’ (see Judy Taylor (ed.) Beatrix Potter’s Letters, Frederick Warne, 1989, p.346) never materialised, but some of her manuscripts and sketches can be viewed in the V&A collections. The present sheet is a preparatory sketch for an illustration of Cinderella’s coach. There are two other drawings relating to Cinderella in the Linder Bequest, both of which show a pumpkin coach. In Potter’s interpretation, Cinderella’s carriage is drawn by three pairs of rabbits, while the coachmen are mice.