Virginia Lee Burton, Artist at Home

This is another repost of from a an old series of posts on a few of the author/illustrators of classic children’s literature.

Virginia Lee Burton created the wonderful machinery heroines (Yes, they were girls!) like Mary Anne, the obsolete steam shovel who finds a new line of work in Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and Katy the determined little tractor in Katy and the Big Snow. Virginia Lee Burton, the name used for all her children’t books, was her maiden name. More officially, and in her other works, she was Virginia Lee Demetrios, wife of George Demetrios, and mother of the two little boys for whom she was creating books.

Virginia Lee Burton’s life and work has several remarkable similarities to Wanda Gag’s life and work, starting with the turn her life took because of difficult circumstances in her family. Wanda Gag gave up some of her dreams to support her family after her father died, while Virginia Lee Burton hoped to be a dancer, and had just signed a contract to be in her sister’s dance troupe when her father broke his leg. She chose to stay home to look after him instead of travelling as a dancer. That, she said, “was the beginning and end of my dancing career, which was just as well, because I wasn’t very good anyway.”

While at home in Boston, Virginia Lee took a job as a “sketcher” for the Boston Transcript, making sketches of dancers and actors to accompany articles written by the drama and music critic. It was in Boston that she enrolled in a drawing class taught by George Demetrios, an art teacher who had come highly recommended to her, and whom, after only a few months, she married.

Once she had her two sons, Virginia Lee became interested in producing books for children. She tested both the stories and the drawings on her own children, adjusting things (or not) depending on their reactions. “Children,” she said, “are very frank critics.” And excellent ones, too, judging by the quality of the finished work her collaboration with her sons produced.

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Wanda Gág, Free to Imagine

According to my long-ago children’s literature professor, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats was the first children’s book to use a repeated refrain throughout. (You know it, right?: “…hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats!”) It was a technique used in oral versions of folk tales, but it hadn’t made its way into books before Wanda Gág wrote this one. It was also the first children’s book to use a double-paged spread and hand lettered text.

People thought of Wanda Gág as a “free spirit”, and her work is unique and innovative, but she was hardly free. She was a Minnesota native, the oldest of seven children, and only fourteen when her father died of tuberculosis. His last words to her were “what Papa has left undone, Wanda will have to do.”

And so she did. It was her work doing odd jobs illustrating magazine articles, greeting cards, and calendars that made the money that kept the family together. She graduated from high school in 1912, but didn’t feel free to accept her scholarship to art school until the next two sisters had graduated, too, and were established as teachers.

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Sunday's Hymn: We Give Thee But Thine Own

We give thee but thine own,
Whate’er the gift may be:
All that we have is thine alone,
A trust, O Lord, from thee.

May we thy bounties thus
As stewards true receive,
And gladly, as thou blessest us,
To thee our firstfruits give.

O hearts are bruised and dead,
And homes are bare and cold,
And lambs for whom the Shepherd bled
Are straying from the fold.

And we believe thy Word,
Though dim our faith may be,
Whate’er for thine we do, O Lord,
We do it unto thee.

—Will­iam W. How

Other hymns, worship songs, sermons etc. posted today:

• Abide with Me at By Grace Alone
• My Hope Is Built at Graces Daily
• He Giveth More Grace at The Happy Wonderer
• I Wonder at Gospel Grace
• What Wondrous Love Is This! at Theology for Girls
• Newton on reading the Scriptures at Tried With Fire 
• Lifting Up Our Hearts - 8 at The Upward Call
• Lord’s Day 46, 2013 at The Thirsty Theologian
• You Weekly Dose of Spurgeon at Pyromaniacs: “So it is”

Have you posted a hymn (or sermon, sermon notes, prayer, etc.) today and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by contacting me using the contact form linked above, and I’ll add your post to the list.