The art of Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1900–1933

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“Rosalie saw before her eyes a tree of marvellous beauty” from Old French Fairy Tales.

Continuing the series of occasional posts mining the scanned library books at the Internet Archive, these illustrations are from a 1920 edition of Old French Fairy Tales by Comtesse Sophie de Ségur and a 1921 volume of Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Virginia Frances Sterrett, like Beardsley and Harry Clarke, was another artist whose life was cut short by tuberculosis. She was a remarkably accomplished 19-year-old when she illustrated the Sophie de Ségur book. Her incredible illustrations for The Arabian Nights (1928) can be seen here.

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“They walked side by side during the rest of the evening” from Old French Fairy Tales.

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“She whipped up the snakes and ascended high over the city” from Tanglewood Tales.

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“This pitiless reptile had killed his poor companions” from Tanglewood Tales.

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4 thoughts on “The art of Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1900–1933”

  1. I remember this book! I used to check it out over and over as a child from our little library. I was fixated on her illustrations, as I was with Kay Nielsen’s

  2. I have a first edition… inherited from my mother, and I have just paid a bomb to have it re-bound, as the spine and the sewing had disintegrated over the years.
    I am very fond if it also – the illustrations were so like Erte, so very evocative of the period…

  3. Virginia Sterrett was my grandmothers aunt. I was fortunate enough to inherit all of her original art work as well as her “doodle” pad that she used. She was such a wonderful artist..

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