Jessica Miller

And for the first 47 years of her life, she lived in this house at 22 Bolton Gardens, Kensington.

She was born into a comfortably middle-class family, originally from the area around Manchester, a city in the north of England.

It was, at the time, one of the world's first great industrial cities, famed for its skyline of red brick factories and textile mills.

Beatrix's paternal grandfather was the proprietor of a calico printing works.

Her maternal grandfather, the proprietor of a cotton mill.

Her own father was a London barrister.

Despite their upper middle class respectability, an artistic streak ran through the family.

Her mother, Helen, was a keen embroiderer and loved to spend evenings dipping her paintbrush into her pot of watercolors and producing moody scenes of the windswept landscapes of her childhood or more temperate scenes of her London garden.

Helen would later gift her paint box to Beatrix.

Beatrix's father, meanwhile, was an avid devotee of a relatively new artistic discipline, photography.

Beatrix would watch, fascinated, as her father set up his camera on his tripod, then disappeared behind the dark cloth which shrouded the camera and blocked out all the light.

She waited eagerly outside the door of his darkroom to see how the final photograph appeared.

He loved to take portraits of her and, when he was born six years later, of her younger brother, Bertram.

She didn't even mind standing completely still for minutes at a time, so that her likeness in the final photograph would be clear, not blurry around the edges.

Following her father's influence, Beatrix would grow up to become an accomplished photographer in her own right.

Like many Victorian girls, Beatrix was sheltered from much of the world.

She and Bertram were educated privately by a series of governesses.

Because Beatrix was a girl, she wasn't expected to take much interest in serious subjects like Latin or mathematics.

Instead, she was encouraged in more ladylike pursuits, playing music, sewing, and, of course, the watercolor painting, which would eventually make her name.

However, her parents didn't discourage her from those serious subjects when she showed an interest.