Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter at the Keswick Show, 1935, taken by an anonymous photographer, © Frederick Warne & Co. 2006

Although she died in 1943, Beatrix Potter is still one of the world's best-selling and best-loved children's authors. She wrote and illustrated a total of 28 books, including the 23 Tales, the 'little books' that have been translated into more than 35 languages and sold over 100 million copies.

The V&A holds the world's largest collection of Potter's drawings, literary manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and related materials, and hosts a changing display on particular aspects of her work in the Beatrix Potter Showcase. As a child and young adult Potter visited the V&A to study and copy prints and drawings and, later, costumes - her illustrations of the mayor's wedding outfit in The Tailor of Gloucester (1903) are exact copies of 18th-century clothes in the museum's collections.

Although she is best known as the creator of charming and exquisitely illustrated children's stories, Beatrix Potter had other significant talents. Achieving far more than was expected of - or thought proper for - the daughter of a rich Victorian family, she was not only an artist and writer, but a gifted natural scientist and botanical illustrator, then later in life, an enthusiastic farmer, sheep-breeder and conservationist.