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, 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.

Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit books, published by Frederick Warne from 1902, reflect her interest in natural history. The illustrations are full of accurately rendered examples from the natural world, from foxgloves to the animal characters themselves.

This sheet of studies of a ground beetle (Carabus nemoralis) shows the beetle at different magnifications, and from above and below. A ground beetle later featured in one of the Peter Rabbit books, The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse (Frederick Warne, 1910; see the illustration on p.13 of the 2002 edition).