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拍品專文
Beatrix Potter kept a diminutive menagerie at her home. Her pets included lizards, mice, bats, rabbits, and snails. On 30 July 1898, Potter wrote and illustrated a letter describing the episode which occasioned this drawing: "I am writing to you instead of Eric because I think you saw my tame snail, and he did not see it ... I had to dig up my snail's nest when I left home. I found there were 79 large eggs! It was such a queer nest in the ground and the snail had covered it up with soil. The eggs were white just like the eggs you had for breakfast, they would be just the right size for little mice! I brought them up here in a little box; the old snail did not take any more trouble about them after she had covered up the hole. Yesterday morning, after 4 weeks, the eggs began to hatch, 9 came out, and 4 more today. They are such pretty little snails with quite hard shells, but almost like glass, I expect they will soon go darker; they are beginning to eat." The recipient of this letter was Freda Moore, a younger sister of Noel Moore. Noel is famous as the recipient of an 1893 letter from Beatrix Potter which contained "a story about four little rabbits," i.e. the first description of Peter Rabbit.
Potter was clearly enamored with her old pet snail and this is a loving portrait. The snail hold a spade in one "hand" and admonishes a wood louse with the other. Her underground nest is full of white, round eggs and shown in cross-section along with depictions of thieving wood-lice. The drawing is explained by a limerick of Potter's:
"There was an old snail with a nest—
Who very great terror expressed,
Lest the wood-lice all round
In the cracks under-ground
Should eat up her eggs in that nest!
Her days and her nights were oppressed,
But soon all her fears were at rest;
For eleven young snails
With extremely short tails,
Hatched out of the eggs in that nest."
See Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, The Morgan Library and Museum, 2024. A closely related drawing to this one was in that exhibition and dated by Potter June 26 - July 28, 1898.
Potter was clearly enamored with her old pet snail and this is a loving portrait. The snail hold a spade in one "hand" and admonishes a wood louse with the other. Her underground nest is full of white, round eggs and shown in cross-section along with depictions of thieving wood-lice. The drawing is explained by a limerick of Potter's:
"There was an old snail with a nest—
Who very great terror expressed,
Lest the wood-lice all round
In the cracks under-ground
Should eat up her eggs in that nest!
Her days and her nights were oppressed,
But soon all her fears were at rest;
For eleven young snails
With extremely short tails,
Hatched out of the eggs in that nest."
See Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, The Morgan Library and Museum, 2024. A closely related drawing to this one was in that exhibition and dated by Potter June 26 - July 28, 1898.