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.

An artist himself, Rupert Potter (1832-1914) was probably the single greatest influence on his daughter's enduring passion for the arts and natural history and on her development as a writer and illustrator. Rupert took up photography in the 1860s when it was still a relatively new art form and was elected to the Photographic Society of London in 1869. An enthusiastic and skilled amateur, he later contributed to photographic exhibitions. Rupert's favourite subject was Beatrix herself. Photography was an expensive and laborious process yet she appears to have endured patiently the elaborate choreography and the camera’s uncomfortably long exposure. Rupert's prolific legacy of several hundred photographs forms a broad pictorial account of Beatrix’s life from infancy to marriage.

Prior to her marriage to William Heelis (1871-1945) in 1913, Beatrix was expected to accompany her parents and brother on extended summer holidays to Scotland and the Lake District. In 1912 the family rented Broad Leys, a house near Bowness on Windermere. Nearly every day Beatrix made the long journey from Bowness to Hill Top in Sawrey, the farm she had purchased in 1905 with royalties from the sale of her little books: 'I have kept very well & managed the going backwards & forwards; but it takes it out of me'. (Letter to Millie Warne, 22nd August 1912.) Yet, despite an exhausting and rainy summer, Beatrix wrote to her publisher from Broad Leys with an idea for a new book, 'a story about two disagreeable people, called Tommy Brock & Mr Tod'. (Letter to Harold Warne, 14th July 1912.) The Tale of Mr. Tod was published in October.

When this picture was taken in September 1912, Bertram Potter (1872-1918) had been secretly married to Mary Scott (d.1939), the daughter of a Scottish farmer, for ten years and Beatrix had been secretly engaged to William Heelis for three months. Although she had accepted William Heelis's proposal in June, Beatrix postponed informing her parents until later in the summer, knowing that once again they would disapprove of her choice of husband.