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.

Although this drawing probably dates from the 1890s, before Beatrix Potter had begun publishing the Peter Rabbit books, she came back to it when drawing one of the illustrations for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, when Peter becomes stuck in a gooseberry net and three sparrows arrive to encourage him to exert himself (p.37 in the 2002 edition); one of the sparrows is based on the bird seen in the foreground of this study.