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, Beatrix Potter made numerous imaginary drawings, as well as illustrations for fairy tales, fables 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. Some of her imaginary scenes were also published as greetings cards by the firm Hildesheimer and Faulkner from 1890.

Ernest Nister, a German firm who published children’s books for the English market from their London offices, also published some of Potter’s designs during the 1890s. This drawing is a preparatory sketch for a design now in the National Trust collection that Nister featured on the front cover of one of their books, Changing Pictures: a Book of Transformation Pictures, in 1894. The book also contains six full-page chromolithograph illustrations with paper tabs allowing readers to operate slats and ‘transform’ the movable pictures. In the finished version of Potter’s illustration, the basket contains turnips as well as carrots.

An illustration in Potter’s later Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes (begun in 1905; published by Frederick Warne in 1917) returns to the subject of a rabbit finding a basket of carrots outside of the door. It is accompanied by the lines: ‘And when she peeps out there is nobody there, But a present of carrots put down on the stair.’