At Home With Beatrix Potter: The Creator of Peter Rabbit
- Book Review,
by Susan Denyer
Amazon.com
The richly illustrated At Home with Beatrix Potter will delight the many admirers of the artist and writer of children's books. Her beloved characters--Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and their whimsical friends--were inspired by the English countryside, which she grew to love during summer vacations as a girl. In 1905, at the age of 40, Potter bought Hill Top Farm overlooking Esthwaite Water in the Lake District, a region of hills and lakes famous for its glorious landscapes. She continued to buy property in the area with her royalties, and by the time she died 37 years later, she had amassed over 4,000 acres. She fought vigorously to preserve the beauty of the Lake District and its rural ways, leaving her estate to the National Trust, Britain's leading conservation agency. This book, written by an official of the Trust, is a tribute to the jewel of the estate, 17th-century Hill Top Farm. Potter restored and furnished it as a showcase of English country ways, though she actually lived in a large cottage nearby. Her substantial collection of Lake District antiques reflected the influential Arts & Crafts movement, which emphasized the integrity of handmade objects in a period of increasing mechanization. The book takes us on a tour of the farm, alternating the artist's original photographs and watercolors with photographs of the building and countryside as they look today. Several two-page spreads of the garden in early summer and the Lake District in late autumn are especially beautiful. Unpretentious, solid, charming, understated: At Home with Beatrix Potter embodies the rustic virtues that Beatrix loved. --John Stevenson
Book Description
The creator of Peter Rabbit, Samuel Whiskers, and Jemima Puddle-Duck, Beatrix Potter (1866-1942) is one of the best-loved children's book authors of all time. Yet few in America are aware of the role she played in protecting some of England's most beautiful landscapes and in designing romantic interiors and a lovely garden at Hill Top, her beloved Lake District farmhouse. Taking the reader through her picturesque house and the breathtaking scenery around it that inspired many of her famous stories, this charming book is the first to look at the intimate connection between the English countryside and Potter's work. Her own exquisite sketches and watercolors, as well as personal ephemera, appear alongside specially commissioned full-color photographs, revealing a home filled with treasured old furniture and beautiful objects and celebrating an artist-storyteller whose legacy as a conservationist at last receives the attention it deserves.
About the Author
Susan Denyer, who has lived in England's Lake District for many years, works for Britain's National Trust. Her publications include Beatrix Potter and Her Farms, Lake District Landscapes, and A Century in the Lake District.
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