The Lake District in Paint: Her Landscape Watercolors

Most people picture Beatrix Potter painting a rabbit in a blue jacket. Far fewer have seen the other side of her work. Away from the books, she painted the Lake District itself — the fells, the lakes, the snow on a stone wall. These were the Beatrix Potter Lake District watercolours she made for no one but herself.

They were never meant for a publisher. She did not sell them or exhibit them. Many were never printed in her lifetime. She painted what she saw, because she loved looking at it.

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Esthwaite Water, her favourite lake

One small lake mattered to her more than any other. It was Esthwaite Water, beside Near Sawrey, the village where she would later make her home.

She knew her choice was odd. The grander lakes drew the crowds and the praise. She wrote that she had "often been laughed at for thinking Esthwaite Water the most beautiful of the Lakes." She did not mind. To her the showier scenery looked "almost theatrical, or ultra-romantic." She preferred a quiet, working landscape with mountains behind it.

She drew Esthwaite again and again, in every season. The art writer Anne Stevenson Hobbs notes that she loved it most in winter. One painting from December 1912, "Esthwaite Water, glassy with cold," shows the lake almost emptied of colour. Mist has thinned everything to soft grey. The thin wash of watercolour suits the damp, cold air exactly. There is no drama in it. There is just the lake, very still, on a hard winter morning.

She painted it in summer too. A 1906 watercolour shows waterlilies on Esthwaite, their pads laid flat and pale on the dark water. The same lilies turn up later in The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher. By then she had moved Jeremy from his old Scottish river to a Lake District pond.

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The early Lake District work

She had been painting Lakeland subjects for years before Sawrey. The Potters spent long summers in the north, and Beatrix sketched wherever they stayed.

One survivor is "Coniston Old Hall," drawn from life in 1890. She made it in chalk, not her usual watercolour. Most of her other chalk work belonged to her teenage years in Hertfordshire, so the Coniston picture is a rare late use of the medium. It shows an old Lakeland building set in its own ground — exactly the kind of plain, rooted local architecture she would later love and defend.

Buildings always interested her as much as hills. The grey stone houses, the slate roofs, the farms tucked under the fells: to her eye these belonged to the landscape, not on top of it.

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Rain over Lingholm

Long before Sawrey, the family rented Lingholm, a large house near Keswick on the shore of Derwentwater. Beatrix spent several summers there from the late 1890s. The grounds and the views around it gave her dozens of subjects.

One painting stands out. It is called "Rain," made at Lingholm in August 1898. The house sits in the picture from an odd, off-centre angle. Rain falls over the slate roofs and the heavy sky.

To get the wet, she did something clever. She soaked the paper before she painted. The colour bled and blurred on the damp sheet, so the whole scene looks soaked through. Hobbs points to this as a real piece of skill — she was making the method match the weather.

People sometimes called her a "fairweather painter," because the smiling scenes in her books rarely show rain. Her own private sketches tell another story. There is plenty of weather in them: rain, mist, frost, and the low grey skies that hang over the fells for half the year.

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The Newlands Valley

Near Keswick, Beatrix walked and sketched in the Newlands Valley. One watercolour of it survives in what is known as her Derwentwater sketchbook.

This one has a small twist. She liked the view so much that she used it again, slightly changed, as a setting in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. So here we can watch a pure landscape turn into a book picture: the fells painted first for their own sake, the little hedgehog washerwoman added afterwards.

How those real places ended up inside the stories is a whole subject of its own. We follow it in The Landscapes in the Books.

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Sawrey under snow

In 1905 Beatrix bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey. From then on she had less and less time to paint. Farming filled her days, and the books still had to be made.

So she painted in the gaps, mostly in winter, when the land went quiet. That is why so many of her late Lakeland scenes are snow scenes.

March 1909 was her busiest spell of pure landscape work. Hobbs records that she spent five of six days in a row sketching out of doors, in and around the village. The cold did not stop her. "Sawrey village under snow" comes from those days. So does "Hillside under snow, with sheep and stone walls." The sheep are small dark shapes against the white. The walls run up the fell in thin grey lines.

She had a good eye for the colour of snow. She once wrote about the "peculiar blue" of snow under a white frost. In the snow paintings she warms the white with a little fir green for depth, and now and then a touch of orange for the low sun.

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How she painted the Lake District watercolours

Beatrix called herself a draughtsman first. Drawing came before colour. But she was a fine colourist too, and she chose her method to fit the thing in front of her.

She liked watercolour above all other media. She preferred clear, see-through colour over thick, opaque paint. A wet wash could hold the damp Lakeland air better than heavy paint ever could. For the snow and the misty lakes, that thin, watery touch was the whole point.

Her late landscape sketches surprised people. Some, done fast in wet blobs of colour around 1909 to 1911, look almost modern — loose and nearly abstract. Hobbs compares them to the painter Wilson Steer, an early English experimenter with Impressionism. Most British artists of her day kept their distance from that style. Beatrix, quietly, did not.

She was hard on her own work and never made grand claims for it. Less than a year before she died, a magazine article compared her to Constable and other great English painters. She thought that was "absolute bosh." She revered those names, she said, but to set her work beside theirs was "silliness." All the same, she shared Constable's love of paint and of nature — and something of his fresh, dewy light.

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The home farm, kept apart

There is one Lake District subject we leave to its own article: Hill Top itself. The farm, its garden, and the cottage she painted so often make a separate story. We tell it in Hill Top Farm on Paper.

These landscapes were never her trade. They were her rest. After a day of sheep and slate and account books, she would go out to sketch. The cold weather was "a refreshment," she said. She meant it even when it meant standing in the snow with frozen hands.

She painted these hills for herself. That is exactly why they feel so honest. There is no story to tell, no child to please. There is only Beatrix Potter, looking hard at the country she had chosen, and putting down what she saw.