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.

Before publishing her own stories from 1901, Potter illustrated fables, fairy tales and classic texts, such as Uncle Remus, Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella. She drew largely to amuse herself, or children she knew, but also to develop her illustrative technique. Her interpretations of these well-known texts are always fresh, original, and faithful to the true nature and appearance of animals.

This design, one of four related sheets in the Linder Bequest, illustrates ‘The White Cat’, a fairy tale by the Countess d’Aulnoy. Another version of this design is inscribed ‘1894’ and ‘Hertfordshire’; see museum number BP.1146(a). As such, it and the small group of related drawings were probably made during one of Potter’s 1894 visits to Camfield Place in Hertfordshire, the country home of her paternal grandparents, the surrounding landscape, seen with a covering snow, included within her illustrations. Writing in her journal Potter called Camfield, ‘the place I love best in the world’.

Another drawing related to this group was published in a booklet by the firm of Ernest Nister, who published some of Potter’s drawings within their children’s publications of the 1890s. Their 1896 Holiday Annual, for example, included Potter’s series of drawings, ‘A Frog He Would a-Fishing Go’.

Anne Stevenson Hobbs suggested that the kittens included in Potter’s illustrations of ‘The White Cat’, with their guns and game-bag, might have been inspired by sporting prints. These early cat characters also seem to pre-empt Potter’s 1914 protagonist, the gun-wielding and boot-wearing cat in Kitty in Boots (not published during Potter’s lifetime).