An American Original.(Virginia Lee Burton)(Biography)

Byline: Jean Nathan. editor: Valerie Steiker

Few know that iconic children's-book author Virginia Lee Burton also created a design collective.

For more than 70 years, the classic children's books of Virginia Lee Burton --among them Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House --have captivated generations of readers young and old. But Burton was also the creative force behind a highly successful textile collective called the Folly Cove Designers. Named for the area near Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Burton lived and worked, the group set a new direction in fabric design during the resurgence of American folk art in the thirties. Like Burton's bright, warmhearted books, Folly Cove prints have a timeless and universal appeal. At the same time, these colorful, handcrafted designs, bursting with natural motifs, could have been taken off the spring runways. As Harold Koda, the head curator of the Met's Costume Institute, says, "There is a kind of sweetness and utopian quality to their project. They satisfy our nostalgia for free-spirited, freethinking imagining."

Burton's richly productive life is an inspiring tale of fashioning new worlds. Jinnee, as she was known, was born in 1909 to Alfred Burton, an engineer and dean at M.I.T., and the much younger Lena Yates, a British artist and writer. Claiming the New England winters were ruining her health, her mother uprooted Jinnee and her brother and sister to California in 1917, then left the family altogether in 1925, when she fell in love with a former student of her husband's. The three children were separated, with Jinnee being sent to a foster home.

With resilience and determination, Burton set her sights on becoming a dancer, taking ballet lessons--and also winning a state scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. "Overcoming obstacles was very much how Jinnee saw the world," says Christine Lundberg, who conceived and produced Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place. Directed by Rawn Fulton, this enlightening new documentary film, which explores her life and art, will be shown this month at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. "She was working in a man's world," Lundberg continues. "In that sense, she was a pioneer."

In 1928, the now strikingly beautiful nineteen-year-old with a megawatt smile and a lithe dancer's body was back East in Boston with her aging father, when she was invited to join a dance group in New York City. But then her father broke his leg. Burton changed course to stay home and care for him, channeling her aptitude for drawing into a job as a "sketcher" on the Boston Transcript. It was in a drawing class at the Boston Museum School in the fall of 1930 that she met and fell in love with the sculptor George Demetrios, her handsome Greek teacher. They married that spring.

After the birth of their son Aristides, in 1932, the family moved to the Folly Cove area of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a picturesque seaside community on Cape Ann. By 1935, when their second son, Michael, was born, the Depression had taken its toll on their finances, and Burton decided to try her hand at children's books as a way to generate income.