Virgil Burnett collection

Virgil Burnett was born in 1928 in Wichita, Kansas, to a miller and builder who travelled widely within the United States. He attended Columbia University in New York as an undergraduate, studying painting with Edward Melcarth (1914-1973), an artist who endowed his working-class subjects in Venice with the monumentality of the great Renaissance Venetian masters who were his inspiration. Burnett was drafted into the Korean War shortly after he received his degree from Columbia. He trained as a combat engineer but spent his two years in service working as an artist-illustrator for an anti-Soviet propaganda company in Germany. Burnett worked for NATO, teaching drawing, for a few years after his service. He subsequently enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he graduated with a master's degree in art history in 1956. He studied the influence of English literary masters on Delacroix’s work, marking the beginning of his interest in the relationship between art and text. Burnett continued his education with a Fulbright scholarship to study in Paris from 1956-1957. There he met a number of significant literary and artistic figures, in particular Maurice Darantière (1882-1962), a noted master printer and publisher of fine books who published the works of distinguished French authors, as well as the original edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. Darantière inspired Burnett to pursue a career in the book arts, helping him to realize his potential as an artist and illustrator. Throughout the 1960s, Burnett worked as an illustrator on commissions, primarily designing book covers for Penguin. During this period, he founded Pasdeloup Press, which produced its first work, Le roi s’amuse, in 1966. In the years that followed, Burnett worked with a number of talented poets and authors, such as Daryl Hine (1936-2012), A.D. Hope (1907-2000), and Maurice English (1909-1983). In the 1970s, he began seriously writing and illustrating his own works, including Skiamachia (1977), Towers at the Edge of a World: Tales of a Medieval Town (1980), and A Comedy of Eros (1984). From 1973 to his retirement in 1992, Burnett worked as a professor of fine arts at the University of Waterloo in Stratford, Ontario. After his retirement, he turned to sculpture and began experimenting with terracotta sculptures of the female form until his death in 2012.

Information culled from local sources. Some information taken from Virgil Burnett Illustrator (2006) by Jo Bordley Neglo.