A Beatrix Potter exhibition at the Morgan Library is about more than just storybooks.
Mrs. Rabbit pouring out tea for peter while her children look on. NEW YORK — As a boy, I never had much regard for the story books written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter in the first decades of the 20th century. Her watercolors were treacly and her tales too simple-minded and rustic.
That larger perspective helps clarify the peculiar mix of charm and unsentimental menace in her work, a sense that there are worlds not quite contiguous with our own, subject to friction and conflict when they come into contact. That friction can be potentially deadly, whether it is a rabbit stuck in garden netting or tempting fate from a farmer’s gun . It can also be comic, and often it is hard to tell where the comedy levels off and the potential tragedy begins.
Jemima Puddle-Duck” , a scene in which a naive and attractive young fowl is seduced into the clutches of a wily fox seems comic, yet it is gendered to feel like the set up for rape. The primary difference between the animal drawings she made before her literary career and the illustrations for her children’s books is the addition of sharper contour lines, as if going over a shaded water color with a little ink clarifies the transition from the real world to children’s fantasy. That roughing in of a few sharper edges parallels the addition of Victorian moralism to the animal world.
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