Day 10: V & A Museum: The Blythe House

Brief History of the V & A 

The building was originally the Post Office Saving Bank.  The government acquired this building with the purpose of storing artifacts from three museums: The Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Science Museum.  We heard that the Blythe House is closing due to lack of funding. The archives will move to another lcoation on East London next to the London School of Fashion, a creative artsy hub. 

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blythe_House.jpg

 The Art and Design Archives: 

We arrived at the V & A Museum, located at the Blythe House, on the Kensington neighgorhood. We were greeted by Andrew W. who escorted us into the Archive of Art and Design room were the Beatrix Potter Collection is housed together with Childrens' books collections from  Guy Little, Queen Mary, Horton Collection of Soviet childrens' books, and the Renier family collection.  We listened to the story of how the Beatrix Potter collection was acquired by the V & A museum.

The Beatrix Potter collection is the largest in the world.  It was thanks to a wealthy business man, Leslie Linder, who bequeathed his Beatrix Potter collection. Among the most valued are the journals of Beatrix Potter since she was fifteen years old. Her journal was written in code. It took Linder 14 years to decipher her code. Andrew Wiltshire wrote a book about Mr. Linder's decoding  of Mrs. Potter's journal, which led to discovering her life as a young girl before she became famous for her Peter Rabbit tales, during the Victorian period.

The collection contains original sketches and watercolours, manuscripts of the 23 books she published.Mrs. Potter was a very intellectual woman and very talented creative artist. She loved the country lived in Hill Top Farm. She studied botanics and mycology,  her observations were not taken seriously in her time. Probably she would have discovered penicilin fifty years earlier.

Linder published her decoded journals on 1,966. He later in 1970 wrote an encyclopedia about Beatrix Potter. Without Linder's role as an enthusiastic curator it would not have been possible to learn more details about Potter's life, an probably she would not have been as famous as she is now. About 49 million copies of Potter box are sold and in 46 languages.

References:

Beatrix Potter Collections. Retrieved from http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/beatrix-potter-collections/
Peter Rabbit Website. https://www.peterrabbit.com/beatrix-potters-secret-code-breaker-with-andrew-p-wiltshire/
 Museum of Childhood Archive. Retrieved from https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/archives