Beatrix Potter aged 15 with her springer
spaniel
(Wikipedia)
|
Beatrix
Potter (1866-1943) was one of the earliest members of the then Armitt
Library in Ambleside founded in 1912. Seventy years after her death,
the Armitt Museum and Library (in conjunction with the National Trust
Archive, the Frederick Warne Archive and the Beatrix Potter Society)
is celebrating its connection with Beatrix Potter through an
exhibition in words and images on her life and work as well as on the
people and places of the Lake District that were important to her.
The exhibition is entitled, Image and reality. For
further details visit http://www.armitt.com/
or for a BBC Cumbria news item about the exhibition
see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-23125593.
The
famous and highly successful children's author had come to live at
Hill Top Farm in the neighbouring village of Near Sawrey in 1905 soon
after the death of Norman Warne to whom she had been betrothed. She
had fallen in love with the Lake District during family holidays
there and she now took the opportunity to help preserve local life
and landscape. To this end she bought up surrounding farms and spent
more and more of her time on estate management and rearing
prize-winning sheep in partnership with a local solicitor, William
Heelis (a founder member of the Armitt), whom she married in 1913.
She also found time to produce new items based on her famous
characters - Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck, Samuel Whiskers and the
rest.
Beatrix Potter
became one of the Armitt Library's greatest benefactors with the
bequest of her botanical drawings, watercolours and personal copies
of the first editions of her children's books. The botanical drawings
included her beautiful and scientifically significant studies of
fungi undertaken in the 1880s and 1890s. On 24 April 2013, a
distinguished audience at the Linnean Society in London heard
Patricia Routledge, actress and president of the Beatrix Potter
Society, pay tribute to the "wonderful collection of astonishing
depictions of fungi" held by the Armitt. On that occasion, a
young lady dressed as Beatrix Potter, read Miss Potter's paper On
the germination of the spores of agaricineae: when originally
presented in 1897, the society had insisted it be read by a man!
For
further information take a look at: