Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900–1931)

 A very good Flavourwire piece on ten classic fairy tale illustrators has introduced me to a new favourite: Virginia Frances Sterrett. 

Here's a bit from her obituary:

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.

You can read more about her short life at Vintage Book Illustrations but for now just bathe in all this beauty and colour.