Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature. Nice title and that’s what I expected: a nice, polite exhibition. I didn’t expect to feel profoundly moved. But the familiar drawings and stories called up memories of listening to my daddy tell me bedtime stories about adventurous rabbits, with a whoosh of feeling safe and warm and cared for and loved.
The exhibit is geared to appeal to ‘little rabbits’ with a glowing mousehole at floor level, drawers of objects with PLEASE TOUCH signs, and scampering mice shadows.
TIL: it wasn’t all floofy bunnies. Miss Potter was curious about all creatures great and small. She drew and painted bats and terrapins, and she was particularly enamored with fungi. Her walking stick had a built-in magnifier for examining details of the natural world.
Miss Potter also drew on the postcards she sent, collected a treasure trove of objects she used in her illustrations, included her grandmother’s cane chair in the miniature world she created. She had no use for the limiting expectations of society for a woman of her social class, left 4,000 acres of bucolic landscape to the National Trust, and coaxed a dwindling breed of sheep back from the brink of extinction. In many ways, she was far ahead of her time. Did I mention she loved dogs?
The finale of the exhibit immersed the visitor in Beatrix Potter’s world with a floor-to-ceiling video loop of her beloved lake district. It spoke to the nature lover and knitter in me. Well played, V&A. Well played.
It was noon and time for a light lunch of Winter Quiche and Caeser salad.
Really, why would you eat anywhere else?
I was working my way down the hall of sculpture when Truth and Falsehood, by Alfred Stevens, stopped me in my tracks. Truth in the act of tearing out the forked tongue of Falsehood. Sign me up.
This couple’s funerary monument. I can imagine the sculptor murmuring to the client ‘something that suggests eternal rest, perhaps?’
Wandered through another section, I found some delicious Indian works on paper and many fascinating small works, like this woman with a hawk.
My eye was also caught by this drawing of a lapidary drilling a hole in a gemstone.
I find myself more interested in images of people in the act of working than lushly attired royalty striking a pose. Not that I don’t adore embroidery and rich fabric. I’d just rather see the seamstress and tailor working on it than the monarch wrapped up in it. The needlework on display here is a whole other realm of delight, but that will have to wait until tomorrow
I’ll end with this bit of bonsai magic in the inner courtyard. Someone has got kickass pruning skills
Back tomorrow.
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