Virginia Sterrett
Arabian Nights

Hazar Afsaneh (A Thousand Tales) is a Persian book that was the basis for Arabian Nights. Virginia Sterret illustrated these fairy tales as well as two other books, Old French Fairy Tales and Tanglewood Tales.

Focused on the fair and humane treatment of women and the drawing of one into the tales being told are what made this a unique work.

Virginia Frances Sterrett was born in Chicago, Illinois to a small family. She had one sister and her father died while she was a baby.

With the death of her father, the family moved to Missouri and then Kansas to be close to relatives. In 1902 at the age of two, Virginia drew her first picture and from then on she was hooked.

Most of her time was spent drawing and dreaming of the fantasy land depicted by her artwork.

When Virginia was seven she started school and still she spent most of her time drawing and daydreaming. She was a loner and didn’t have time for the childhood friends and playing that other children enjoyed.

On a trip to her aunt’s in Topeka, Kansas she was prodded into entering some of her pictures in the Kansas State Fair Exhibition. To her surprise she won three first prizes and one second.

Upon returning to Chicago in 1915 and finishing high school, Virginia did some advertising work for a department store in the area.

They were quite impressed with her work and a top executive got her a meeting with management at the Art Institute of Chicago.

They were so taken by her work that they gave her free tuition to attend the institute. She attended for 14 months until her mother’s health forced her to leave school to support the family.

For three years she got jobs at various advertising agencies to support her family. Her own health began to decline and on a vacation to rest to St. Louis, Missouri where her mother’s sister lived she was given the bad news that she had tuberculosis.

Penn Publishing commissioned her in 1919 to illustrate Old French Fairy Tales and in 1921 Tanglewood Tales. In 1923 she and her family moved to California where Virginia’s health became bad enough for her to have to go to a sanitarium.

She continued to do her life’s love of illustrating but only on a part time basis. Penn Publishing once again commissioned her to illustrate Arabian Nights.

This work, completed in 1928 brought her some recognition and for a time her health improved. However on her last commissioned work for Penn Publishing, Myths and Legends she had a relapse of the tuberculosis and died on June 8, 1931.

Her work on Myths and Legends was not finished. After her death, one last exhibition of her work was held by the St. Louis City Art Museum.