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.

As a young woman Beatrix Potter studied natural history with some seriousness, exploring the collections of the Natural History Museum, including the insect cases and fungi specimens. She had a collector’s cabinet full of specimens, from shells to dead butterflies and moths, and used a magnifying glass and a microscope to examine them more closely. She made numerous carefully observed studies of animals and plants from life.

By her mid-twenties mycology, the study of fungi, had become a strong interest, and Potter made many exquisitely detailed watercolour drawings of fungi over the next few years. Her interest was also scientific, and a (now lost) paper she wrote on the subject was read at a meeting of the prestigious Linnean Society of London in 1897, when Potter was 30. Potter noted that the present study shows ‘polyporus versicolor’, a common polypore mushroom.