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.

Beatrix began drawing at an early age. By the age of eight she was filling homemade sketchbooks with scientific studies of animals and insects. Flowers, too, were a favourite subject; she trained her eye and hand by copying the outlines of foxgloves, periwinkles and daffodils in Vere Foster's Drawing Books. Beatrix's parents, Rupert and Helen, nurtured and encouraged Beatrix's extraordinary artistic talent. From the age of twelve to seventeen Beatrix was tutored in art by a Miss Cameron from whom she learnt 'freehand, model, geometry, perspective and a little water-colour flower painting' (Journal, 28 May 1883).

Beatrix's juvenile observations of animals and flowers were to develop into a lifelong passion for scientific investigation. She even learned to prepare slides of specimens to view with her brother’s microscope. Although Beatrix was never taken seriously as a scientist in her lifetime, her mature natural history studies demonstrate an acute power of scientific observation. Fascination with scientific accuracy underpins Beatrix’s artistic technique. Flowers create an exquisite backdrop to several of her tales, most notably The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-pan, and she observes them with astonishing attention to detail.