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 childhood, Beatrix Potter delighted in studying and sketching the old furniture and oak-paneled rooms of the houses she visited. From 1903 Potter made a number of visits to Gwaynynog in Denbighshire, the home of her uncle, who spent his large cotton fortune collecting mahogany furniture (including the eighteenth-century writing desk shown in this drawing) to enhance the oak furnishings of the house. Her uncle’s ‘perfect taste’ inspired Potter’s own interest in furniture; she later remembered the oak-paneled rooms and fine furniture of Gwaynynog very fondly.

After purchasing her first Lake District property, Hill Top, in 1905, Potter took a keen interest in furnishing the house with family furniture from London and oak furniture purchased at local sales. The interior of the house inspired some of her book illustrations, particularly those for The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (Frederick Warne, 1908). Potter’s interest in furniture continued long after her retirement from writing and illustrating children’s books, when she dedicated much time to buying and restoring Lakeland farmhouses and furniture, leaving fourteen farms and twenty houses to the National Trust upon her death in 1943.