Fungi - Potter's Art - The World of Beatrix Potter

Click on the images above to see more of Beatrix Potter's art by subject

Fly Agaric
(Amanita muscaria),
drawn by
Beatrix Potter
in September 1897
Courtesy of
the National Trust

Beatrix Potter's first existing studies of fungi were painted in 1888, while she was on holiday at Lingholm in the Lake District. Over the next ten years she devoted many hours to her work, presenting a scientific paper on the germination of spores to the Linnean Society in April 1897, and although her findings were rejected at the time, experts now consider that her thesis was correct.

Courtesy of Perth Museum
& Art Gallery.
Charles McIntosh,
the Perthshire Naturalist
who advised Beatrix
Potter on her
study of fungi.

Helped by the Perthshire Naturalist, Charles McIntosh, whom she met in 1892, she painted hundreds of watercolours of all varieties of fungi. Indeed McIntosh praised her for the botanical accuracy of her work.

The Toad's Tea Party, 1905.

Sixty of her paintings were used in 1967 to illustrate Dr W P K Findlay's Wayside and Woodland Fungi and collections of her work are cared for by the Armitt Library in Ambleside and by Perth Museum.

Fungi sometimes appear in Beatrix Potter's illustrations. In The Toad's Tea Party, painted for the unpublished 1905 Book of Rhymes, toadstools appear as chairs and table.