Virginia Frances Sterrett

There, she enrolled in high school and later entered the Art Institute of Chicago with scholarship.

[2] Sterrett received her first commission at the age of 19 (shortly after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis) from the Penn Publishing Company to illustrate Old French Fairy Tales (1920), a collection of works from the 19th-century French author, Comtesse de Ségur (Sophie Fedorovna Rostopchine).

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 Arabian Nights (1928).

[4] The comments of the St Louis Post-Dispatch in the supplement published following Sterrett's death (published July 5, 1931) 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.