Beatrix Potter, author, illustrator and scientist.

During a favourite radio programme this week, the presenter made an aside about the children’s writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter having discovered the biological process of symbiosis. As a seasoned reader of The Tales of Peter Rabbit, Mrs Tiggywinkle and Jeremy Fisher, and someone who collects stories of artists with second strings to their bows, my ears pricked up (like the proverbial rabbit!) and, soon as I could, I hit the Google search button.

Beatrix Potter didn’t, in the event, discover the process of symbiosis.

Symbiosis is relationship where two organisms or creatures offer essential or life-enhancing services to each other. Think of the tiny fish that pick clean the teeth of sharks. One eats, the other gets free dentistry.

What Beatrix Potter did do, even though an amateur, was to design and conduct a series of experiments whose publication in 1897 put her at what scientists now recognise as cutting edge of the biological sciences at the time.

Beatrix’s work as a scientific illustrator of fungi and lichen for Scottish naturalist Charles McIntosh prompted her to do her own research into the subjects she drew in such painstaking and accurate detail. Setting up her own experiments and reading widely on in the field of mycology, she became fascinated by a theory advanced by mycologists in Europe that a lichen was not a single living organism, but was in fact composed of two organisms – an alga and a fungus.

She did much to explore the exact nature of their mutually dependent – symbiotic – relationship, and although scoffed at by the predominantly male British scientific establishment at the turn of the 19th century, to the extent that she withdrew her paper, scientists today give her credit for advancing knowledge of the process considerably.

The rejection of her discoveries came just before her success as an author. Her time and attention moved on from the study of lichen in such detail, but the fortune she made from her smash hit books for children did allow her to become a significant benefactor to science and the preservation of the natural environment in Britain.

Merchandising tends to stress the ‘cutesy’ factor in Beatrix Potter’s drawings, but the Potter tourist attractions in the Lake District and in Perthshire in Scotland (home of Peter Rabbit, Mrs Tiggywinkle and Jeremy Fisher) pay tribute not only to her art, but to her scientific and observational acuity.

I haven’t seen it, but Renee Zellwegger plays Beatrix in the film Miss Potter, released at the very end of last year and pictured above.
There’s a new biography by Linda Lear recently published too.

To read more on Beatrix Potter’s achievements as a scientist, which should fascinate our daughters in their science class –try The Chemical Heritage Foundation.

Other Potter sites are:

http://www.bpotter.com

http://www.beatrixpottersociety.org.uk

http://www.peterrabbit.com

Eyes: body parts in art

In this second in my informal mini-series called for want of a better title, ‘body parts in art’, I’m focussing on eyes.

I’ll probably do several blogs on this topic as my art books are now frilled with post-it notes book marking thousands of years and a global community of the quizzical, the mendacious, the delighted, the introverted, the desperate, the sublime, the resigned, the dejected, the transported.

In Sofonisba Anguissola’s 1555 painting The Chess Game, the players are Sofonisba’s sisters Lucia and Minerva.

They’re watched with great delight by a third, younger sister, Europa. It’s the expression on this little girl’s face that repeatedly draws me to this painting. She’s facing forwards but looking sideways at Minerva, who’s just about to lose the game and is raising her hand. Perhaps just about to protest against Lucia’s taking of her queen. Young Europa gleefully anticipates a sisterly spat? A lovely little girl’s pudgy face too, with a smile just becoming a laugh – but nothing at all cutesy in this joint portrait.

Off to one side, the girls attract the attention of an older woman. She’s plainly dressed and, given the lavish nature of the girls’ costume, is unlikely then to be their mother, who must outshine them. So a maid or nurse. Her expression is remarkable, her gentle personality conveyed in the tenderness of her gaze.

Sofonisba’s painting of her sisters tells more than of a happy family. Anguissola is billed as one of the greatest female painters of the Renaissance. Let’s make that one of the greatest painters. The Chess Game has a serious point to make. Look, it says, women, girls can be logical, rational, can think ahead, play and enjoy strategic games.

One of six sisters, 5 of whom became painters, Sofonisba worked at the court of Spain’s Phillip II for 13 years. Her first husband was drowned when his ship was attacked by pirates. She married again, but without Phillip’s permission or her father’s permission, countering apparently, that “Marriages are made in heaven and not on Earth.”

View The Chess Game with more of Sofonisba's paintings at the Web Gallery of Art. It’s fabulous online resource. Take a tour.

The Web Gallery address is: www.wga.hu

For other posts in this series see: lips