Virginia Sterrett: Art for Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends

Above, we show a vintage

photograph of Virginia Sterrett

Sterrett received her first commission at the tender age of 19 (shortly after she was diagnosed with

Tuberculosis) from The Penn Publishing Company to illustrate "Old French Fairy Tales" - a collection of

works from the 19th Century French author, Comtesse de Ségur (Sophie Fedorovna Rostopchine).

A year after the publication of "Old French Fairy Tales", a new title including commissioned works from

Sterrett was presented by The Penn Publishing Company - "Tanglewood Tales" - a collection of fairy

tales from Ancient Greece as retold by Hawthorne.

From 1923, in failing health, Sterrett was able to work on projects for short periods of time only and as a

result, she was able to complete just one further commission prior to her death - her own interpretation of Scheherazadè's classic Persian fairy tales, "Arabian Nights".

The comments of the "St Louis Post-Dispatch" in the supplement published on 5 July, 1931 - following

Sterrett's death - pay fitting tribute to her life and work:

        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.