1456400 1920 Virginia Frances Sterrett. Old French Fairy Tales.

 

Rostopchine, Sophie (Comtesse De Segur); Sterrett, Virginia Frances (illustrator). Old French Faiiy Tales. Philadelphia: The Penn Publishing Company, (1920).

Single volume, measuring 11 x 8.25 inches: 279, []}. On'ginal full black cloth, color pictorial pastedown to front board, spine and front board lettered in gilt. Color frontispiece, vignette tide page and seven full-page color plates on glossy paper with tissue guards captioned in red, nine half-page black-and-white illustrations, headpieces and tailpieces throughout text Lightest spotting to front board and rear comer.

First edition thus of the Comtesse de Segur's Old French Fairy Tales, featuring young children trapped in a bewildering world of fairy intrigue: "Alas, why will not Bonne-Biche allow me to walk in this beautiful forest? What possible danger can I encounter in that lovely place and under her protection?"

 

Old French Faiiy Tales is best remembered today for the extraordinary Golden Age illustrations of Virginia Frances Sterrett, completed in her late teens, just before she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Reminiscent of the work of Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen, these dreamlike images secured SteITett a second commission from the publisher, for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales (1921). Increasingly unwell, SteITett struggled to finish her third book, The Arabian Nights (1928), and died at thirty. Her obituary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted: "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." A fine copy of a beautiful book.