ARTIST: Virginia Berresford (Massachusetts, 1902 - 1995)
NAME: Blue School
MEDIUM: oil on board
CONDITION: Excellent. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 24 x 18 inches / 60 x 45 cm
FRAME SIZE: 30 x 24 inches / 75 x 60 cm
SIGNATURE: Lower right and on verso
SIMILAR ARTISTS: Mabel May Woodward, Sol Wilson, Harry Leith-Ross, John Joseph Enneking, Arthur Diehl, George Elmer Browne, Robert Emmett Owen, James McDougal Hart, Edmund Darch Lewis, Gordon Hope Grant, Libbian Trynz
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
SKU#: 115183
WARRANTY: 7 days returns accepted if item doesn't match description

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Virginia Berresford (Massachusetts, 1902 - 1995)
Virginia Berresford, 1902-1995, was a Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts painter, printmaker and gallery owner working in a modernist style related to that of Georgia O'Keeffe. She also worked in Paris, France. She studied under Charles Martin at Columbia University, and at the Art Students League and Academie Moderne in Paris. She exhibited at the Bernheim Gallery, Paris, France; The New Gallery, New York City, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, the World's Fair 1939; the Pennsylvania Academy, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Salons of America.
Her works are in the collection of the Whitney Museum; Detroit Museum; and Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts.
Active on Cape Cod, Berresford was an active part of the group that raised the money to locate the local Martha's Vineyard Art Association facility. And in the early 1950s, in Edgartown, she opened the Island's first commercial art gallery.
In her memoirs, she writes that in her second year in Edgartown, she rented a little "fish-house on the harbor for a gallery" to show both her work and that of others. Berresford then describes her second gallery, a shack in Menemsha basin, which she leased in 1954. In the hurricane of 1954, all of the harbor shacks were toppled, all that is save Virginia's Berresford Gallery. She claims that a 300-pound statue of Adam and Eve was ballast enough to keep the building upright.
After deciding that the gallery was too near the water, Berresford bought the corner lot on Basin Road (today, the site of Menemsha Blues) and built a bright new building that would house her gallery for years. Here, she introduced the painter Wo Yuu Kee to the Island. Virginia then decided to diversify and wanted to bring some paintings back downtown to The Upstairs Gallery on Main Street in Vineyard Haven.