Fungus, Fathers, & Forgotten Science of Female Artists
Were dads the secret ingredient to success for Beatrix Potter and others?
Before I admit a dark childhood secret, I want to emphasize that I’ve always loved animals. As a kid, I wanted to know everything about them.
Which was a problem.
Imagine the bunny-love-squeezing character Elmyra from Looney Tunes and you’ve got a vision of six year old me, growing up in suburban Wisconsin. But replace “bunny” with “local toads” and “love-squeezing” with “lethal, curiosity-induced accidental over-handling followed by covert disposal into shallow front yard graves and repeated exhumations to assuage anxieties of premature burials.”
I’m fine, really.
I later graduated to less invasive explorations like staring at goldfish, poking roadkill and copying anatomical illustrations. Unsurprisingly, drawing was the pastime that ultimately became encouraged in my home.
On Sunday mornings my dad sat patiently with my sister and me, teaching us to copy apples and horses from books and magazines. He’d trained as a landscape planner, and his own drafting desk was filled with stacks of hand-penciled neighborhoods and gardens; so serving as our art teacher was a comfortable role for him.
Drawing was a suitable activity for little girls —and that thought resurfaced when I stepped into Beatrix Potter’s Lake District cottage a few weeks back.
Like me, Beatrix and her brother Bertram were animal-obsessed collectors of creatures for pleasure and study, but apparently more hardened to the circle of life than I was. Bertram once wrote to his sister from boarding school, regarding his pet bat:
“If he cannot be kept alive . . . you had better kill him, + stuff him as well as you can.”
I’d wager they accidentally knocked off a toad or two as well.
Beatrix Potter’s English Lake District cottage, Hill House, carries remnants of the naturalist existence she enjoyed late into life, including gardens and nooks that directly inspired scenes in her stories. But between her nature-curious childhood and her successful author/illustrator career, she was briefly something else — a budding scientist.
Beatrix the scientist
Drawn specifically to fungi, Potter captured their beauty in over 350 illustrations and periodically nerded out with fellow amateur mycologist — and former family postman — Charles McIntosh about different theories of germination. Her first set of spores for research came from him.
She had important encouragement from the other men in her life as well. Her uncle, Sir Henry Roscoe, introduced her to George Massee, then Keeper of Lower Cryptogams at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. And after a year of growing spores, at the age of 31, Beatrix handed Massee a paper entitled “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae” to present to The Linnean Society of London. Women were not allowed to attend the Society’s meetings, but her paper was nevertheless received with the help of Massee for consideration.
But she was eventually told by the Society that it wasn’t quite ready for publication, so she withdraw it.
For this, The Linnean Society has since taken a lot of shit. In 1997, an Executive Secretary conceded that Potter was “treated scurvily,” although its website is still skirts the question of her scientific potential:
“Unfortunately, because she withdrew the paper and did not return an amended version for publication, we do not hold any version of it in our archives. […] Without her paper we can’t speculate on her potential scientific career, but her illustrations show that she was driven, analytical and observed specimens in infinitesimal detail. She dared to bring her own ideas to the ‘professional’ table during a time where women were not always seen as equal — an incredible part of her legacy.”
Pat on the back for trying.
But even if her paper was in need of work, saying it’s just “too bad” she withdrew it and didn’t fix it does sound a smidge disingenuous. Let’s be clear: the Society outright barred females and therefore simply wasn’t open to cultivating a promising young woman in the same way they might’ve a young man.
Ambition doesn’t end with one paper. And given her eventual career, Potter almost certainly understood that, just as she likely understood the dead ends of a scientific career.
Beatrix the artist
So instead, she placed her obsession with nature into a brilliant series of children’s books. It wasn’t an easy road, but it was one she clearly had more confidence in —at least enough to carry her through numerous publisher rejections. Eventually, she “decided to take control of her own future,” according to Claire Armitstead for The Guardian — by self-publishing. The Tale of Peter Rabbit had to prove its saleability on shelves for nearly a year before finally being picked up by Frederick Warne, one publisher who’d initially dismissed it. And even afterwards, Potter remained the biggest champion for her own work. Rare book dealer Christiaan Jonkers says in an interview with Armitstead:
“She was very dogmatic about what she wanted it to look like and couldn’t agree with Warne. Also he wanted cuts, so she published 500 copies privately. By the end of the year Warne had given in, cementing a relationship that would save the publishing house from bankruptcy, and revolutionise the way children’s books were marketed and sold.” — The Guardian
Today, Potter’s books have sold more than a quarter million copies. And it’s her persistent ambition in the face of repeated rejection that I find most culpable.
What propelled this repeatedly rejected woman to back her own work so fiercely and independently? Where she lacked scientific confidence, what gave her artistic confidence?
Or who?
Rupert Potter was an non-practicing barrister with a cotton industry inheritance that gave him and his family considerable freedom. Although he allegedly discouraged his daughter’s scientific pursuits, he did encourage her artistic side. After all, drawing was a suitable activity for a little Victorian girl.
And drawing was also Rupert’s passion.
Today, some of his drawings survive in the archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. What they reveal is an appreciation for birds and technical precision for capturing their beauty, which he clearly imparted on Beatrix as well.
But she was the one who ran it into new depths—infusing personality and expression into her creature illustrations. Even in death, her animals exude more life than most. I wonder at which point she realized she’d become the better artist, and whether he‘d admitted to her as much.
Paternal powers may bring flowers
Beatrix Potter isn’t the only female artist whose artsy father formed an early backbone to her artistic confidence.
The most celebrated animal painter of the 19th century, Rosa Bonheur, had a professional art teacher for a father. Raymond Bonheur encouraged all of his children, including his girls, to pursue nature and animal painting as a career — tutoring them himself, since women were banned from the lauded French Academy.
Rosa Bonheur went so far as to acquire a trousers permit (when they were illegal for women) in order to enter public fairs and stock yards to make copious anatomical studies for her famous paintings.
She also kept a menagerie of animals for personal study and enjoyment, complete with a lioness.
Of all her siblings, Rosa was the most scientifically dedicated but also emotive in her portrayal of animals, and eventually she became the most internationally renowned. She was the first female artist to receive the Legion of Honor, a distinction that came after half a century of significant works. As The Smithsonian recalls, Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, famously visited Bonheur’s home unannounced to bestow the award, stating: “Genius has no sex.”
Bonheur’s confidence and boldness in her artist pursuits seemed to extend into the way she lived her life as well; she was about as “out” as a lesbian in the 19th century could be. (For more on Rosa Bonheur, check out my article When Queer Artists Go Missing.)
Bonheur is a unique example of a widely celebrated trailblazing woman of her time. But hundreds of years earlier, the realms of plants and animals — subjects long deemed “appropriate” for ladies to cast eyes upon— enabled women to veil their knowledge of topics that were totally forbidden.
Such was the case with 17th century artist Maria Sibylla Merian, whom Zoe Goldman describes this way in Getty:
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was a woman far ahead of her time: a skilled, meticulous artist in an era when few women could participate in this profession; a self-taught entomologist, botanist, and ecologist before these fields were named or defined […] an entrepreneur who supported her family through her publications and trade in the exotic specimens she studied; and a traveler who, at age 52, undertook the first-ever transatlantic journey for purely scientific purposes.
I visited Arader Galleries in New York recently to check out their new show: In Search of Mrs.: Women & the Radical Art of Science. The collection features watercolors and drawings of forgotten female artists throughout history. Curator Alison Petretti was able to point out details in Merian’s drawings which discreetly indicated her awareness of the reproductive cycles of plants and insects — the knowledge of which would have been considered scandalous for women at the time.
Furthermore, Merian observed lifecycle processes and species which hadn’t yet been well-catalogued or widely acknowledged. She even captured a species of hummingbird now believed to be extinct.
Appropriately, it’s the one being murdered by a spider.
Unlike the vast majority of 17th century girls for whom drawing was deemed acceptable, Merian’s upbringing was surrounded by considerable artistic support: her father was a publisher and artist, and her stepfather — Jacob Marrel — was an artist and art teacher.
Merian’s scientific contributions by way of her intricately observed drawings are becoming increasingly well-accepted today. And for that reason, Petretti is quick to pose a question: “How did female artists of natural history subjects get suppressed into art history?” She sees their contributions as not just belonging to art, but also to science.
History is full of daddy-daughter artistic legacies like these. In fact, it’s hard to imagine the rise of women in the arts without them — and that alone is worth celebrating this Father’s Day.
But it’s not difficult to imagine Beatrix Potter as a mycologist, Rosa Bonheur as zoologist, or Merian as a botanist — or to wonder: if scientific careers had been real options for these women, would they still have become artists?
Perhaps that’s what their fathers wondered as well.
Maybe that’s why they sat their daughters down to draw — helpless to the constraints of the times in which they lived, but determined to pass along seeds of artistic knowledge in the hopes that something beautiful might germinate.
Thank you for clapping! Share with an inspiring pop this Father’s Day, and follow me for more art history deep dives.
Additonal sources:
- Beatrix Potter, NationalTrust.org
- Beatrix Potter, Armitt.com
- “The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter,” by Anna Russell, NewYorker.com
- “Timeline,” BeatrixPotterSociety.org
- “Beatrix Potter’s Greatest Work Was a Secret, Coded Journal She Kept as a Teen,” by Cara Giaimo, AtlasObscura.com
- “Beatrix Potter — mycologist extraordinaire,” by Ardd Fotaneg, BotanicGarden.Wales
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