Arabian Nights

Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900 - 1931) was an American artist and illustrator who 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" (1920) - 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" (1921). 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). The suite became her best known work.

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. In the imaginative scenes she set down on paper she must have escaped from the harsh actualities of existence."

-Lifted from Wikipedia-

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Arabian Nights
• Art Deco
• 1920s

[joebenevides]

@cornelius386: The correct Name is "One Thousand and One Nights". It's a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It's usually known in English as the "Arabian Nights", from the first English language edition in 1706. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature, which is why the Asian artwork varies depending on the story.

[cornelius386]

That's not Arab style. It looks far east Asian. Did this artist know anything about Arab people?