What is your favorite moment from the 20 or so children’s books written by Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)? At the press preview for an exhibition on the British author that recently opened at the Morgan Library & Museum,  “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature,” the curator and department head of literary and historical manuscripts, Robert H. Taylor, ended his opening remarks by reading from “The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher,” to wit: “And instead of a nice dish of minnows—they had a roasted grasshopper with lady-bird sauce; which frogs consider a beautiful treat; but I think it must have been nasty!”

Which is just about perfect when contemplating Potter’s admixture of naturalism and fantasy, of animal appetites and animals acting like people.

One of the many highlights of “Drawn to Nature” is a delicate watercolor-and-pencil rendering from about 1895 titled “The Rabbit’s Dream.” Likely predicated on Potter’s pet rabbit Peter Piper, the piece features a bunny snugly tucked into a four-poster bed. Surrounding this scene is a halo of rabbits drawn from life. Direct observation was key to Potter’s genteel brand of anthropomorphism.

As for drawing, so, too, for story. Writing in the catalog, a librarian at Exeter Cathedral, Emma Laws, notes that “the enduring appeal of [Potter’s] fictional characters … owes something to the fact that underneath their clothes they are real animals.” Notwithstanding the appealing nature of the characters — please, let’s not call them “cute” — their protagonists operate in a realm in which nature is, if not absolute in its dispassion, then given to its wiles.

Peter Rabbit’s father, you’ll remember, went to his great reward after having suffered “an accident” occasioned by Mr. McGregor, after which Mrs. McGregor baked père Rabbit into a pie. Elsewhere, canine shopkeepers ponder the economic consequences of eating their customers and two porcine aunties, having led “uneventful lives,” end up on the breakfast table. Potter wrote that “the secret of the success of Peter Rabbit, it was written to a child–not made to order.” Most adults, she knew, underestimate the imaginative capabilities of children.

“Drawn to Nature” was organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and is part-and-parcel of a range of programs mounted in honor of the Morgan’s centennial anniversary. The exhibition includes a number of “picture letters” from the Morgan’s own collection, each of which offers correspondence punctuated by drawings, many of them tiny. Look for the haiku-like jotting of the author striding matter-of-factly away from a man holding her portfolio. The accompanying text — “I think Miss Potter will go off to another publisher soon!” — is, in this context, all but redundant.

In an eight-page letter, dated September 4, 1893, Potter wrote to the 5-year-old son of her former governess, Annie Moore, in which she recounted the adventures of a family of rabbits. Moore returned the letter, encouraging Potter to flesh out the story. After revising it into book form, the story was subsequently submitted to, and rejected by, half-a-dozen publishers. The seventh time proved the charm for “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.” The rest, as it is said, is history.

The Morgan has filled out that history in a handsome manner, providing an origin story (a sketchbook by 10-year-old Beatrice), influences (William Henry Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Randolph Caldecott), a smattering of academic drawings (look for the astonishingly nuanced “Sole of a nail-studded Roman shoe”), and myriad studies of fungi. Vintage Potter merch is on display, as well as family photos and our lady’s walking stick.

Among the gifts that Potter bequeathed to posterity was 4,000 acres of land in the Lake District at Northwest England. Now part of the United Kingdom’s National Trust, as well as being a Unesco World Heritage site, this land is the basis for the last portion of “Drawn to Nature,” underscoring how a “splendid reality” could be gleaned from a “quixotic venture.” Which, come to think of it, was the key to Potter’s gift all along, and which this splendid exhibition proves to winning effect.