16 About the Artist Virginia Francis Sterrett

About the Artist: Virginia Francis Sterrett (1900-1931)

 Dying tragically from Tuberculosis at the age of 31, the brilliant artist Virginia Frances Sterrett created magical landscapes and a vision of extraordinary beauty. Inspired by classic myths, legend, fairy tales, and folk tales, Sterrett brought life to the realms of the imaginary and fantastic in Old French Fairy Tales, The Arabian Nights and Tanglewood Tales. This eloquent tribute highlights the exceptional gifts and talents of Virginia F. Sterrett (published July 5, 1931, St. Louis Post-Dispatch):

Her achievement was beauty, a delicate, fantastic beauty, created with brush and pencil. Almost unschooled in art, her life spent in prosaic places of the West and Middle West, she made pictures of haunting loveliness, suggesting Oriental lands she never saw and magical realms no one ever knew except in the dreams of childhood … Perhaps it was the hardships of her own life that gave the young artist’s work its fanciful quality. In the imaginative scenes she set down on paper she must have escaped from the harsh actualities of existence.

Retrieved September 24, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Frances_Sterrett

Virginia Sterrett captures the innovative designs of the 1920s with bold colour palettes, strong lines, and geometric shapes. Her work makes a departure from traditional illustrations at the time.

Project Gutenberg eBook: Comtesse de Ségur ( born SofiyaFeodorovna Rostopchina (Russian: Софья Фёдоровна Ростопчина; 1 August 1799 in Saint Petersburg – 8 February 1874 in Paris),Old French Fairy Tales (illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett). (Produced by Iona Vaughan, Meredith Bach, Mark Akrigg and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

To read more about Comtesee de Ségur please open the link below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countess_of_S%C3%A9gur

“She threw her arms around the neck of Bonne-Biche”

“BLONDINE slept profoundly, and on awaking she[33] found herself entirely changed. Indeed, it seemed to her she could not be the same person. She was much taller, her intellect was developed, her knowledge enlarged. She remembered a number of books she thought she had read during her sleep. She was sure she had been writing, drawing, singing and playing on the piano and harp.

She looked around, however, and knew that the chamber was the same to which Bonne-Biche had conducted her and in which she had gone to sleep.

Agitated, disquieted, she rose and ran to the glass. She saw that she was much grown and she found herself charm[34]ing, a hundred times more beautiful than when she retired the night before. Her fair ringlets fell to her feet, her complexion was like the lily and the rose, her eyes celestial blue, her nose beautifully formed, her cheeks rosy as the morn, and her form was erect and graceful. In short, Blondine thought herself the most beautiful person she had ever seen.” Retrieved October 7, 2022. Pp. 33-34. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30129/30129-h/30129-h.htm

Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Penn Publishing Co. 1853. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/976/976-h/976-h.htm. eBook produced by Dianne Bean, and David Widger