Category Archives: Acquisitions

New Acquisitions: Drawings by Beatrix and Bertram Potter of Peter Rabbit, Mushrooms and a Kestrel

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A Family of Artists: Beatrix, Rupert, and Bertram Potter

A Family of Artists: Beatrix, Rupert, and Bertram Potter

Many people pity Beatrix Potter for her restrictive upbringing with limited contact with other children in the family home at 2 Bolton Gardens, London.  For someone with her gifts, there were hidden advantages to her circumstances.  Instead of being sent to school, she was educated by governesses, one of whom, Annie Moore, became a life-long friend.  Beatrix and her younger brother Walter Bertram sound as if they were allowed to do pretty much what they liked in the school room on the top floor, which contained a small menagerie, a lab furnished with space for the dissection of specimens and their examination under the microscope.  There was plenty of time for them to record what they saw in detailed sketches.   In fact, they both drew constantly.

An unfinished portrait of Beatrix by Bertram in the collection of the V&A.

Their parents Rupert and Helen were artistic themselves and greatly attracted to nature; the family’s wealth afforded many opportunities to take extended summer vacations in Scotland and the Lake District.  From their teens onward, Beatrix and Walter used their freedom to explore the countryside and draw in their sketch books.  They surely found inspiration in the classic story “Eyes and No Eyes,” by John Aikin from Evenings at Home (1792-1796).  Many Victorian writers, including John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Mrs. Molesworth, testified that reading it awakened their curiosity and sense of wonder when William described everything he saw on a walk to Broom Heath.  Nothing escaped his attention and everything delighted him, from the shy kingfisher, a cluster of sea shells in a marl pit, the remains of a Roman or Danish camp, the water rat who disappeared into his hole in the river bank.  I can imagine Beatrix and Walter taking as much satisfaction in their adventures as did William.

In 2023 and 2024 the Cotsen Children’s Library was exceptionally fortunate to have acquired two natural history drawings by Beatrix and one by Walter.Attracted by their strange beauty, Beatrix began painting fungi in the late 1880s but it was not until she made the acquaintance of Charles McIntosh, the so-called Perthshire Naturalist, that she began to make a serious study of them.  This fine drawing was not signed or dated by Beatrix, but it was for a time owned by Captain Kenneth Duke, one of her executors.  Doris Frohnsdorff, the distinguished Potter collector and antiquarian bookseller, purchased it and it was acquired from her estate.

Also from the Frohnsdorff estate is this beautiful drawing of a kestrel executed by Bertram in 1886, which displays his considerable talent as a natural history artist.  The small bird of prey is standing on one leg, the other one resting against the fluffy feathers on the lower part of the body.  Its bright black eyes stare fearlessly at the viewer.   Kestrels can be identified by the way they hover while hunting.  Since Bertram drew this specimen, the species’ population has dropped considerably.

Beatrix’s splendid watercolor over pencil drawing of Peter Rabbit’s head from ten different angles dated 1901.  It was torn out of a sketch book by Beatrix in 1928 and presented to seventeen-year-old Ernestine t’Hooft.  She was the daughter of a curator at the Museum Fodor in Amsterdam, who was visiting with the Lake District with her family.  During the visit, Ernestine bought a copy of Jemima Puddle-duck for her collection of Potter little books and the saleswoman told her that her favorite author lived nearby.  Her father wrote to Potter (or rather Mrs. Heelis) and asked if they might visit her.  The t’Hoofts were invited to tea and spent a very pleasant afternoon at Castle Cottage.  Before they left, she presented Ernestine with this marvelous drawing of Peter from ten different angles, inscribed and dated it 1928.  Ernestine kept her entire life: after her death, it came on the Dutch market.Last but not least is another new Potter acquisition that fills a gap in the collection–a  Christmas cards published by Hildesheimer and Faulkner illustrated from a drawing by Beatrix.  I’m not sure why coconuts were associated with the holiday season in the 1890s, but perhaps someone has an explanation?!

 

Made by a Child: Vivie Wivie Redesigns The Flapper’s Magazette: More Issues of a Manuscript Magazine Acquired

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Our favorite girl journalist resurfaced miraculously a few weeks ago, when the New Jersey antiquarian bookseller Between the Covers offered Cotsen two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine edited by “V. V.” and published in Teddington, Richmond by Vivie Wivie & Co. in 1918. The address, which is the same as the editorial offices of The Flapper’s Magazette, leaves no doubts as to the brains behind the operation.

Would the two issues contain information that would lead us to the real young woman? Absolutely!

One issue has no publication date, but the second carries an announcement that starting with this, the May issue, the magazine will be issued every two months.  Flip through the new issues and it’s obvious that Vivie Wivie & Co. decided that the magazine needed a make-over.  The silly jokes and contests that were an endearing feature of the Magazette are history.  More sophisticated young women in daring hats are featured on the covers.And the contents? Each issue consists of more portraits of devastating modern beauties billed as “V. V.’s famous girls,” any one of which can be obtained as a full-page picture from Vivie Wivie & Co., according to another announcement.  No price is given, however. V. V.’s glamorous creatures, some with bobs, a few with wide-brimmed chapeaus, others bedizened with huge bows or artificial flowers, and some with long braids down the back (a “flapper,” according to OED), are signed “Viven Furniss 1918,” “V. Furniss 1918,” or “ViviE 1918.”   The sole man admitted to the Magazine’s pages is a handsome square-jawed aviator,  whom the reader may suspect, is the object of the editor’s dreams.  The only copy in the two issues are the captions.  Vivien’s artwork in the 1918 issues of The Flapper’s Magazine is much more accomplished than that in the Magazette, so it seems safe to say the Magazine is the work of a teenager, and the other of a little girl.

But can it be puzzled out how old she was when she made the manuscript periodicals?

Yes! Almost exactly.

It was pure wishful thinking on my part to have imagined that Vivien must have been the daughter (or other relative) of Harry Furniss (1854-1927), the Irish-born British artist famous for his humorous drawings and caricatures for Punch and illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1993).  He also illustrated G. E. Farrow’s Wallypug series, sometimes collaborating with his artist-daughter Dorothy.  Dorothy was Harry’s only daughter.

So it was back to the drawing board.  Now that I knew that Vivien F. Furniss put together those two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine in 1918, I could search Ancestry Library with a bit more confidence.  It didn’t take that long to find our girl journalist Vivien Florence Furniss.   She was the daughter and oldest of the four children of the assurance clerk Percy Furniss and his wife Maude of Richmond on Thames in Surrey.  Her birth in 1903, parents, place of birth can be found in England and Wales Civil Registration Birth Index 1837-1917.  That would have made her 15 when she drew the “famous girls” of the Magazine.

This inconvenient fact blows out of the water my original dating of the Magazette to the 1920s.  The only evidence I could squeeze out of the text appeared in a limerick.  I leapt to the conclusion that its first line “There was a young lady of Bow, / Who attended a cinema show. / She was heard to remark / “Oh George! It is dark….” (the reader to provide a last line) contained an allusion to the It Girl, Clara Bow (1905-1965) who made her first picture in….  1921.   I should have checked to see if there were other limericks that began with that line.  There were several.

Is there other evidence that might establish how old Vivien was when she edited and illustrated the Magazette?   The picture of “The Little Patriot” showing a blonde girl draped in the Union Jack suggests that she might not have started her first publication project until Great Britain had entered World War I in August 1914.  That would have made her eleven.  Without any dates in the Magazette, it is impossible to know exactly when she was inspired to begin the project, but it seems safe to guess between 1914 and 1917.

This just goes to show how easy it is to give into the temptation to invent an origin story for child-made works on the few “facts” the text seems to contain. Revising the first post is a small price to pay for the discovery that Vivien didn’t abandon her project after one number, and if any thing, she seems to have become more interested in clothes and boys.  Who knows, maybe she did more than these three issues and those may surface on the antiquarian market one day.  What I’d like to know is, did the future Mrs. Philip W. Hume continue to draw after her marriage?  She lived to the ripe old age of 82, passing away in 1985.  Vivie, take a bow!