Where Are the Fungi Drawings Now? The Armitt Museum Collection

Beatrix Potter's fungi drawings did not vanish with her. Most of them live at the Armitt Museum in Ambleside, a short drive from her farm at Hill Top. She left them there herself. The rest are split between two other homes — a museum in Scotland and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. So if you want to find her mycology today, you start in the Lake District. This is a guide to where the drawings are now, and how a visitor or a researcher can actually see them.

She made these paintings between roughly 1887 and 1901 — from her early twenties to her mid-thirties (born in 1866, she was about twenty when she began and thirty-five by the end). They are not the rabbits and ducks she is famous for. They are studies of mushrooms, toadstools, lichens and moulds — drawn with a scientist's care and an artist's eye. For a long time almost no one knew they existed. Today they are studied again.

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The Armitt Museum: the main home

Putting the fungi work at the Armitt was her own choice. She had been a member of the Armitt Library since her marriage, and her husband William Heelis had been its solicitor from the day it was founded in 1912. She knew the three Armitt sisters who set it up, and she approved of what they were trying to build.

Near the end of her life she made sure of it. Linda Lear records that she organized her "mycological portfolios... so that eventually they could be given to the Armitt Trust Library." She had already given the Library her archaeological drawings from the 1890s and her father's books. The fungi folios — tied up with ribbon — followed.

She set one condition. As Lear puts it, Beatrix directed: "if they accept drawings I want them to accept books." The books she meant were her working library on fungi. They included Henry Coates's biography of her mentor, the Perthshire naturalist Charles McIntosh, and the Stevenson volumes she had used to classify her specimens. She wanted the drawings kept with the tools that made them. The Armitt holds that whole picture, not just the pretty sheets.

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What the Armitt holds beyond the drawings

The Armitt was never only an art store. Mary Armitt founded it as a working library of local history, natural history, archaeology and the literature of the Lake Poets. Over the years its donors ran from G. M. Trevelyan to Arthur Ransome. Beatrix was one of its most important givers.

Her gifts there go well past the fungi. The Armitt holds her archaeological drawings, her father's books, and the show catalogues she kept from years of judging Herdwick sheep. It holds her as a reader and a member, not just as a name on a label. If you want the scientist rather than the storyteller, this is where she sent that half of her life.

For the art itself — what the watercolours actually show, the species, the accuracy, the beauty of them — see our piece on the 300 fungi watercolours. And if you are planning a day at the museum itself, the practical visitor's guide is the Armitt Museum, Ambleside.

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How to see the fungi drawings

Here is the honest version. The fungi watercolours are a study collection, not a permanent wall display. The Armitt rotates items into its exhibitions, so on any given day you may or may not find a fungi sheet hanging up. To be sure of seeing the work you have in mind, you arrange it in advance.

That matters most for researchers. If you want to handle or study specific drawings, the museum runs an appointment system for its archive and study collection. You write ahead, say what you are looking for, and the staff bring out what they can. This is normal for a fragile paper archive. It protects the drawings and it gets you the right ones.

A few plain pointers:

• Contact the museum before you travel if seeing the fungi work is the point of your trip. Opening days and current displays change.
• Be specific. "Her fungi watercolours" is a large group. A species name, or a piece you have seen reproduced, helps staff find it.
• Reproductions exist. Some of the drawings have been published in book form, so you can study many of them without travelling. The 1990 volume A Victorian Naturalist: Beatrix Potter's Drawings from the Armitt Collection is one starting point.

Because details like opening hours and access can change, treat anything practical here as a prompt to check the museum's own current information, not a timetable.

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Where else her natural-history work lives

The Armitt holds the bulk of it, but not all. The mycologist Roy Watling, writing for the Linnean Society, put it simply: the surviving folios of her fungi and lichen work are held in three places — the Armitt Trust in Ambleside, the Perth Museum in Scotland, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The Perth Museum and Art Gallery holds the drawings tied to Charles McIntosh, the Perthshire postman and naturalist who taught her. She often painted a specimen twice, sending one version to him and keeping the other. The drawings she sent McIntosh came, in time, to Perth. None were signed, and for years no one knew they were hers — they were only identified when the mycologist Mary Noble worked them out. A rare "Old Man of the Woods" specimen she painted near Crieff is also there.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds more of her natural-history work, through the Linder Trust. Watling notes that many of her spore-germination experiments "can be seen in the collections of her works in the Victoria and Albert Museum." This is the split worth remembering: the Armitt has the great body of fungi drawings, while the V&A holds Beatrix Potter material from across her whole life, the science among it. The two collections are companions, not rivals.

For the London side — what the V&A holds and how to use it — see our reader's guide to the V&A collection.

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Why they were nearly lost — and why they survived

It is worth knowing how close this work came to disappearing. Beatrix asked, in her own day, to stay anonymous as a student of fungi. Henry Coates, who wrote the life of Charles McIntosh in 1923, kept her secret, calling her only a lady who later made a name in the subject. For decades after her death the drawings sat largely unstudied.

They were brought back into the light slowly. In 1967 the mycologist W. P. K. Findlay used fifty-nine of her drawings to illustrate a fungi volume in the "Wayside and Woodland" series. In the late 1970s Mary Noble began the work of identifying and crediting the unsigned drawings at Perth. Watling and others have since traced the real science in them. Modern mycologists, Lear notes, still refer to her watercolours to identify fungi — they are that accurate.

That is the quiet reason the Armitt collection matters. These are not relics behind glass. They are working scientific records, in the place she chose for them, still doing the job she made them for. You can go to Ambleside and ask to see them. Few people do. That feels like the last small piece of the secret she kept.