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.

From early childhood Beatrix Potter spent time drawing the many pets that she kept in her schoolroom: over the years, her pets included lizards, snails, bats, mice, rabbits and many other animals. During the family’s long summer holidays to rural areas she also took the opportunity to draw the plants and animals she saw in the countryside. Even her earliest childhood drawings show a serious interest in natural history, her sketches annotated with information about the species concerned.

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 at home, 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.

This sheet is an annotated proof of a lithograph that Potter made illustrating a particular spider species: Linyphia triangularis. The lithograph also includes four enlarged details of the spider. While at least one of the related drawings of this spider species by Potter dates from a trip to Lingholm in the Lake District in July 1887, Potter’s work on the lithograph is thought to date from 1895-6, when she is believed to have undertaken her work on a group of entomological lithographs. These were commissioned by the scientist Caroline Martineau (see Linda Lear, Beatrix Potter: a Life in Nature, 2007, p.98).