The name Virginia Lee Burton (1908-1969) may not ring a bell, but if you were lucky enough to have grown up with books in your home, books that were written before you were born such as Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Creswick's Robin Hood, both illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, may have been a part of your life, especially at bedtime when a loving adult read to you from them. Next to these on the bookshelf, stories such as "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel," "Katy and the Big Snow," "The Little House," "Calico the Wonder Horse," and "The Song of Robin Hood" may be among your earliest very dear memories of reading--especially since these were often books you could read yourself as time went on.
Before dawn this morning I saw a wonderful documentary, "Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place" (2008) on PBS World celebrating the work and life of this individual, who was a driving force in the arts in the Cape Ann area of Gloucester, MA during her life there with her husband George Demetrios and their two sons, Aristides and Michael. Today her work is still read and treasured by children, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Boston MFA, and the Peabody-Essex Museum, as well as her local Cape Ann Museum.
The PBS version of this doc was only sixty rich, all too brief minutes. Fortunately, it appears that there is an 87 minute version also available and created by filmmakers Rawn Fulton and Christine Lundberg. The DVD of this film is readily available along with a book about the life of the artist, "Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art" (Houghton Mifflin) by Barbara Elleman.
A wife, a mother, an artist, a designer, and a mentor to many who longed to be designers as well, more about this artist can be seen at the link below and the PDF shown below. The film may be re-aired in your area this week. Here are links to PBS World and The Cape Ann Museum:
http://worldchannel.org/programs/episode/virginia-lee-burton-sense-place/
http://www.capeannmuseum.org/media/cam_timeship_virginialeeburton.pdf
One of the revelations for me in the documentary cited above was the exceptional design work that was inspired by Virginia Lee Burton and the Folly Cove Designers who worked with her. There are some lovely examples of this here:
http://www.pinterest.com/annettejohnston/virginia-lee-burton-folly-cove-designers/
Here's an interesting, detailed story about the printing techniques of the Folly Cove Designers from Life Magazine, Nov. 26, 1945:
http://books.google.com/books?id=xUsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA80&dq=folly+cove+designers&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UuEtU5bvDKemygHWp4CIBg&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=folly%20cove%20designers&f=false
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