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.

Largely self-taught, Beatrix frequently studied and sketched the collections of her local museums in Kensington. Her association with the V&A, then known as the South Kensington Museum, is immortalised in The Tailor of Gloucester (1903); her illustrations of the Mayor's wedding outfit, including the silk waistcoat, are exact copies of eighteenth-century costumes in the V&A. Beatrix also copied works of art by Randolph Caldecott, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth in the V&A's ‘Art Reading Room'.

In this drawing Beatrix has copied the image of Mary Gainsborough as she appears in Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of his two daughters (c.1758), bequeathed to the V&A by John Forster in 1876. Beatrix also made a separate copy of Margaret Gainsborough who appears on the right of Mary in the original painting.

Beatrix took a particular interest in Thomas Gainsborough's paintings. She frequently attended exhibitions at the Royal Academy and recorded her impressions of his work in her journal: ‘I think that Gainsborough deserves his fame but, as far as I have seen ... it rests on a very narrow basis. The Blue Boy is enough to immortalise any artist, but the common notion that a portrait or landscape being by Gainsborough must be valuable and excellent, is completely erroneous. All great artists have painted rubbish at times, and Gainsborough, considering the height to which he could rise, has painted more than most’ (Journal, 20 February 1885).