A new exhibition featuring Beatrix Potter’s original artwork, The Language of Flowers, opens at the Beatrix Potter Gallery, Hawkshead, on Sunday 27 March 2022.
Opening next week, The Language of Flowers explores Beatrix’s relationship with flowers through her art and life and invites visitors to look beyond her beloved characters, to see the colourful and realistic flowers around them, showing her talent as both an artist and scientist.
Bringing together her books, sketches, watercolours and decorative items, the exhibition looks at flowers as both medicine and food, and the significance of Beatrix’s flower-filled Hill Top garden in her world-famous books.
The exhibition traces Beatrix’s love of flowers throughout her life, from her early botanical studies and lessons in flower painting, to her flower press from Hill Top showing her keen interest in gardening. Illustrations from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers and The Tale of Two Bad Mice highlight the inspiration she took from cultivated flowers, particularly geraniums. Floral ceramics from her childhood home are also on display following recent conservation work funded by the Royal Oak Foundation.
Through Beatrix’s books we can see how Beatrix valued knowledge about plants and flowers, for medicine and common sense. Watercolour illustrations from The Tale of Benjamin Bunny show wise Mrs Rabbit with her burrow filled with dried flowers but Jemima Puddle-duck is not so clever. She can be seen picking tasty herbs in the garden, unaware that thyme and sage are tasty seasonings for duck.
This year, the downstairs space in the gallery has also been transformed to give visitors an overview of Beatrix’s life, legacy and ‘little books’ and her journey from artist and illustrator to farmer and conservationist. A specially commissioned map, created by Kendal based illustrator Evelyn Sinclair, gives a sense of the scale of the land she left to the National Trust. Visitors will also be able to see Beatrix’s teenage journals, written in her secret code, and the key to Hill Top, a hugely symbolic item representing the independence she gained with its purchase.
The exhibition has been created by the new curator for National Trust properties Hill Top and Beatrix Potter Gallery, Dr Alice Sage. A historian and curator of childhood, with expertise in early 20th-century art and illustration, Dr Sage says: ‘The Language of Flowers brings together Beatrix Potter’s talents as an artist and a scientist and highlights her love for gardens and nature. Through the exhibition we want to encourage visitors to look beyond the characters in Beatrix’s illustrations to see the colourful and accurate flowers around them, demonstrating Beatrix’s skill as an accomplished botanical artist with a knowledge and passion for flowers. It’s a pleasure to curate this exhibition in such a quirky space and start to get know the treasures of this incredible collection.’
In an exciting year for the team at Hill Top, the Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature exhibition opened on Saturday 12 February at the V&A Museum in London. Created in partnership with the National Trust, a selection of the National Trust’s items belonging to Beatrix, including several from the Beatrix Pottery Gallery and Hill Top, are on display at the London museum throughout the whole of 2022.The exhibition details Beatrix’s life starting with her childhood in Kensington and charting her journey to the Lake District, and explores the impact she had on conservation and preservation of farming and the landscape. Beatrix Potter spent the last 30 years of her life buying and protecting land in the Lake District, eventually leaving a significant bequest of over 4,000 acres of land, farms and cottages to the National Trust.
Since 1988 the Beatrix Potter Gallery has presented annual exhibitions of Beatrix Potter’s original artworks. The watercolours are highly sensitive to light and can fade quickly.
The artwork you see on display at the Beatrix Potter Gallery might not be shown again in the next decade, in order to protect it for future generations to enjoy.
The Language of Flowers exhibition runs at the Beatrix Potter Gallery until 30 October. The gallery is open Sunday to Thursday. Pre-booking is recommended, but not required. Tickets are on sale now. Entry is free for National Trust members. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/beatrix-potter-gallery-and-hawkshead
