In her unfortunately short life, Virginia Frances Sterrett fought to fulfill her desire to be an illustrator against the ravages of tuberculosis, which she contracted at the age of 19, the same year she received her first commission to illustrate a book, Old French Fairy Tales by Comtesse de Segur.

Sterrett was born in Chicago but grew up in Missouri and Kansas. Her father died when she was young. When she was 15 the family moved back to Chicago and, after high school and a stint doing advertising for a department store, she so impressed the Art Institute of Chicago with her abilities that they agreed to admit her and waive her tuition, which she could not have afforded.

Shortly thereafter, her mother became ill and she had to leave the school and work to support her family. It wasn’t long after that her own health began to fail. Though she recovered to a large extent after time in a sanatorium, and had several productive years, her life was cut short by the tuberculosis at the age of 31, just a few illustrations shy of completing Myths and Legends.

Sterrett’s fluid, colorful and elegantly designed compositions, which echo the Art Nouveau inflected illustrations of Golden Age greats like Kay Neilsen and Edmund Dulac, have a beautiful otherworldly quality. One can only imagine or hope that they in some way provided an escape for Sterrett from the harsh realities of her life.

There is a site devoted to her, with a good bio, though it only features illustrations from one book, Arabian Nights.

Art Passions has a relatively complete set from all of her books, Old Book Art has some large images from Tanglewood Tales (click through the linked images twice to get to the largest images).

Since her work was done in the early part of the 20th Century, the books are now in the public domain and you can read complete facsimiles of Tanglewood Tales and Old French Fairy Tales on the Internet Archive.

Amazon lists available paperback copies of Old French Fairy Tales, Volume 1 and Volume 2, but I haven’t seen them and I don’t know anything about the quality of the reproductions.

David Apatoff has an excellent post on Virginia Frances Sterrett on his always enlightening blog Illustration Art.

In the late 90’s (I think it was 1998), in my role as a website designer, I was at a convention for internet professionals called Internet World in New York City. One of the exhibitors was an enthusiastic group at a low-rent table, with a rather bare bones display, handing out leaflets and encouraging people to check out a new search engine with an odd name.

Alta Vista was the hot search engine at the time, wowing people with its (for the time) large searchable databased index of web sites. Few gave much attention to the upstart, though word was that it was producing surprisingly good results.

Not that many years later, Google became synonymous with searching on the web, and is now an integral part of everyday life for millions of people around the globe. One of Google’s original decisions, a choice that made it stand out as something different, was their spare interface; it was an exercise in minimalism amid the other search engines, who were looking to maximize profit by cramming dozens of news, feature and advertising boxes into their search page, to the point where the search feature was almost lost.

Much to their credit, Google has kept that simplicity on their main search page even now. But they have, over the years, lightened it up with variations on their iconic logo; at first with a few cartoon-like objects replacing the “O”s; eventually, as the practice became more common, with more elaborate illustrations, often with the “Google” almost hidden in the design (though always discernible if you look).

The Google Doodles as they are sometimes called, are now done by a team of designers at Google, along with occasional guest Doodles and Doodle contest winners.

CBS News recently did a short feature on the Google Doodles and some of the Doodlers behind them. The online version includes a slideshow.

Of course, you can always go to the source and view Google’s own archive of Doodles, along with a history of the practice.

One of the features I’ve come to enjoy is the inclusion of a number of Doodles celebrating the birthdays of artists, illustrators and cartoonists.

(Doodles above for: Vincent van Gogh, Diego Velázquez, Pablo Picasso, Ilya Repin, Leonardo da Vinci, Edvard Munch, Rene Magritte, Jackson Pollock, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Norman Rockwell, Albert Uderzo.)