Beatrix Potter: Christmas cards to go on display at V&A

The popularity of the cards encouraged Potter to approach greeting cards publishers

Three Christmas cards designed by a young Beatrix Potter are to go on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The cards were made when Potter was 23 to provide friends and family with "five minutes' wonder".

They were her first commercially successful works and marked the start of her career as an illustrator.

They will be displayed as part of the Drawn To Nature exhibition at the V&A, which will open in February until 2023.

The exhibition will offer a backdrop to Potter's childhood in South Kensington in London and feature key objects from her early years, including an album of family photographs taken by her father as well as artwork and furniture from the family home.

Potter, who was born in 1866 and died in 1943, remains best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as The Tale Of Peter Rabbit, but was also a prominent natural scientist and conservationist.

The popularity of the cards encouraged Potter to approach greeting cards publishers with her work, and in 1890 her designs were commissioned by London-based company Hildesheimer & Faulkner.

This card depicts a rabbit inspired by Potter's pet, the "charming rascal" Benjamin Bouncer delivering Christmas post

The first two cards from the V&A's collection show off her famous anthropomorphic style of illustrating animals.

One depicts a rabbit inspired by her pet, the "charming rascal" Benjamin Bouncer delivering Christmas post, while another, on loan from the National Trust, features guinea pigs dressed in school uniform, chasing after their mother.

Going on display for the first time in 20 years, the third card is a hand-drawn prototype for an "elaborate" card requested by Hildesheimer & Faulkner showing an autumnal scene of a field mouse in a nest of leaves.

It was never printed widely after publishers instead selected an illustration of mice in a coconut.

Beatrix Potter: Drawn To Nature runs from February 12 2022 to January 8 2023

Annemarie Bilclough, the museum's curator of illustration, and Frederick Warne, curator of the exhibition, said: "We are delighted to be able to include an original design and two examples of Christmas cards printed from designs by Beatrix Potter, her first commercially sold illustrations.

"The cards such are an important part of the story of Beatrix's journey to becoming an author-illustrator and the success of the cards speaks to her practical mind and business acumen."

Beatrix Potter

• Helen Beatrix Potter, born 28 July 1866, in Kensington, west London

• The children's author and artist was also a botanist and wrote scientific papers on fungi spores

• Before Potter wrote her classic books, she drew illustrations for some of her favourite stories, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Cinderella

• She was a pioneer in the licensing of her creations for merchandising and created the first Peter Rabbit doll herself in 1903

• Potter loved the Lake District and bred Herwick sheep on a number of farms she bought in the area

• When she died in 1943, she left 15 farms and more than 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust, an organisation she had supported staunchly during later life

• Her home Hill Top Farm was kept exactly as it had been when she lived in it

Source: Penguin Books Limited's Peter Rabbit website