Three Christmas cards designed by the young Beatrix Potter will be exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in the New Year.

Created when Potter was 23 to provide friends and family with “five minutes of wonder,” it was her first commercially successful work and marked the beginning of her career as an illustrator.

They will be exhibited as part of the V&A’s ‘Drawn To Nature’ exhibition, which opens in February and tells her life story through more than 240 personal objects.

Potter, who was born in 1866 and died in 1943, is still best known for her children’s books featuring animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but she was also an important scientist and environmentalist.

Due to the popularity of the cards, Potter approached greeting card publishers with her work and in 1890 her designs were commissioned by the London firm of Hildesheimer & Faulkner.

The first two cards showcase her famous anthropomorphic style of animal illustrations – one from the V&A collection shows a rabbit inspired by her pet, the “charming rascal” Benjamin Bouncer, delivering Christmas mail, while one on loan from the National Trust shows guinea pigs in school uniforms chasing their mother.

The third card, exhibited for the first time in 20 years, is a hand-drawn prototype for an ‘elaborate’ card commissioned by Hildesheimer & Faulkner, depicting an autumnal scene with a field mouse in a nest of leaves.

It never reached a large print run after publishers chose an illustration of mice in a coconut instead.

Annemarie Bilclough, the museum’s curator of illustration, and Frederick Warne, exhibition curator, said: “We are delighted to be exhibiting an original design and two examples of Christmas cards printed from designs by Beatrix Potter, her first commercially sold illustrations.

“The cards are an important part of the story of Beatrix’s journey to becoming an author and illustrator, and the success of the cards is testament to her practical mind and business acumen.”

– Beatrix Potter: Drawn To Nature runs from February 12, 2022 to January 8, 2023.