The Tailor Returning Home 1902

Beatrix Potter sketched this damp, snowy scene of a tailor returning home with ink and watercolor on paper. Look at the pinky-brown wash, like she’s stained the paper. You can almost see the artist in the act of painting this image. It’s as though Potter built up the world with each watery stroke, each line of the pen, revealing details of the tailor's journey home, the snow gathering on ledges and roofs. Imagine Potter there in the cold, sketching the scene. She’s using the ink to define the edges, and the color to convey the feeling of a cold day. The architecture in the background fades away. Is it a trick of the light? Or the way the artist’s eye has seen it? The tailor himself becomes a mark, a figure in the landscape, his posture a kind of painterly gesture. Potter was interested in the relationship between the natural and the human world. She has created an image of a moment in time that’s both fleeting and eternal. It has a quality like Japanese prints, these artists are all in conversation together, each one inspiring the next.