Animal magic

Graham Greene in his ground-breaking essay on Beatrix Potter published in 1933 writes of ‘her great comedies’, her ‘great near-tragedies’ and ‘her Tempest’ (Little Pig Robinson). He calls Peter Rabbit and his cousin Benjamin ‘two epic personalities’ and invokes Dickens, Forster, Cervantes, Rabelais and Henry James as well as Shakespeare. He gets some of his dates wrong, underrates The Tailor of Gloucester, quite unaccountably dismisses The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher as a failure, but considers Samuel Whiskers (The Roly-Poly Pudding) her masterpiece, and characteristically revels in her ‘dark period’ and her ‘gallery of scoundrels’, among whom he rather unfairly includes Mrs Tittlemouse’s muddy-footed neighbour, Mr Jackson the toad (‘No teeth, no teeth, no teeth!’). The essay, which is perhaps only partly, if at all, ironic, ignores Potter’s illustrations almost entirely and concentrates especially on her literary qualities, the ‘elusive style’, the ‘creation of atmosphere with still-life’, ‘those brief pregnant sentences, which have slipped, like proverbs, into common speech’.

This exhibition does the opposite, though Ian Dejardin, the new director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, points out in his Foreword to Anne Stevenson Hobbs’s splendid catalogue that of all the illustrators who have written their own texts, ‘only Potter is as famous for her words as for her images’.

The illustrations to the 21 Tales — or 23, if you count the two books of nursery rhymes — are, of course, at the heart of the exhibition, but they are surrounded by a wealth of the material which went to create that unforgettable alternative world of small English creatures and their settings. Here are the early drawings — mostly watercolour and/or pen-and-ink — of mice, bats, rabbits, squirrels, birds, spiders, moths, fish, frogs, fungi and even fossils in which she honed her skills of close observation and meticulously detailed depiction during her teens and twenties.