Virginia Lee Burton - Biography

Biography

Virginia Burton was born in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, the daughter of a British poet-musician mother and a father whom she said was the first dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she was approximately 8 years old, the family moved to San Diego, California, and a year later settled nearby in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Burton won a state scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts, in San Francisco. Living across the bay in Alameda, while attending art school, she used the long commute by train, ferry boat and cable car "to train myself in making quick sketches from life and from memory of my unaware fellow passengers." In 1928, after a year at art school, she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father lived and near her sister, a dancer in New York City, New York. She found work as a "sketcher" on the newspaper the Boston Evening Transcript, working for two-and-a-half years under its drama and music critic and signing her sketches "VleeB".

In fall 1930, Burton enrolled in a Saturday morning drawing class taught by sculptor and artist George Demetrios at the Boston Museum School, and by spring the two were married. For a year, the couple lived in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where their first son, Aristedes, was born. They then moved to the Folly Cove neighborhood of Gloucester, Massachusetts, though their second son, Michael, was born in nearby Groton on on Burton's birthday in 1935.

She said her she wrote her first published book, Choo Choo (1935), about an anthropomorphic train engine, after a learning experience with a previous, unpublished effort:

My first book, Jonnifer Lint, was about a piece of dust. I and my friends thought it was very clever but thirteen publishers disagreed with us and when I finally got the manuscript back and read it to Aris, age three and a half he went to sleep before I could even finish it. That taught me a lesson and from then on I worked with and for my audience, my own children. I would tell them the story over and over, watching their reaction and adjusting to their interest or lack of interest ... the same with the drawings. Children are very frank critics.

In 1941, Burton founded the Cape Ann, Massachusetts, textile collective Folly Cove Designers, whose works were included in arts and crafts exhibitions of the 1940s and 1950s, and are in the collections of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Burton died in 1968 of lung cancer.