Background
In addition to the pet frogs of Potter's youth, influences on Jeremy include Potter's sport fishing father Rupert William Potter and illustrator Randolph Caldecott. Margaret Lane, author of The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter, notes, "Mr. Potter was fond of taking his friends fishing and Beatrix ... from an early age had been familiar with hazards and excitements of angling and dry-fly fishing ... as a girl had often enough had to endure her father and his friends relating their fishing adventures, and the picture of Mr Jeremy Fisher retailing his mishap to Sir Isaac Newton is so rich in observation, both of amphibians and elderly gentlemen, that one is ever afterwards prone to confuse them in memory". Mr. Potter not only sport fished but collected the works of Randolph Caldecott. In Jeremy Fisher, Potter tried to copy Caldecott but felt she had failed. "I did try to copy Caldecott," she stated, "but ... I did not achieve much resemblance." Biographer Linda Lear writes Potter declared, "I have the greatest admiration for his work – a jealous appreciation; for I think that others, whose names are commonly bracketed with his, are not on the same plane at all as artist-illustrators".
Potter biographer Linda Lear and author of Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature writes:
wanted to do a frog story for some time, because it was amusing and offered the opportunity for the naturalist illustrations she delighted in ... The story of a fisherman down on his luck reminded Beatrix of the 'fish stories' her father's friends had told in Scotland, as well as her brother's travails with rod and reel. She also recreated the gentlemen's club atmosphere absorbed from her father's reports of evenings spent at the Reform and the Athenaeum ... The text and illustrations for this story are some of the most balanced and compatible of all her writing. Nature is described and illustrated truthfully: beautifully tranquil as well as unpredictably aggressive ....Its carefully coloured botanical backgrounds of water plants, a frog with anatomically correct turned-out feet, a trout that any self-respecting fisherman would enjoy snagging, and a rather frighteningly rendered water-beetle who tweaks Jeremy's dainty toes, all made it a delight to look at as well as to read.
Read more about this topic: The Tale Of Mr. Jeremy Fisher
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