She made pictures of haunting loveliness.
April 9, 2011 8:05 PM Subscribe
19 year-old
Virginia Frances Sterrett was commissioned by the Penn Publishing Company to illustrate
Old French Fairy Tales by Comtesse de Segur (1920). Sterrett was already ill with tuberculosis, the disease that would end her life at age 30.
In her brief career she completed two more illustrated books, both for Penn:
Tanglewood Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Arabian Nights. She did much of her work while in a sanatorium and could only draw for brief periods. A fourth book, an edition of
Myths and Legends, was never finished; her TB came out of remission and she died in the summer of 1931. The incomplete drawings have never been published.
Though she was largely self-taught,
Sterrett's arresting visual style evokes other Art Nouveau illustrators, including
Kay Nielsen and
Edmund Dulac.
For once, those wild and crazy Victorians won't get all the fun!
posted by pla at 8:27 PM on April 9, 2011