Provincetown Houses is a lithograph created in 1925 by American artist, Virginia Berresford. Her pencil signature in the lower right is the only marking on this lithograph. The edition is thought to be quite limited and it was probably printed in New York. The ivory wove paper bears an unidentified heraldic watermark in the lower right that extends from the image into the lower margin. In the upper right image is an indistinct seal that reads Drawing Board USA. The image measures 19 x 15 images and an impression of Provincetown Houses is in the National Gallery of Art [2008.115.869].
This sparse, geometric, modernist lithograph would have been created by Berresford before she moved to Paris in 1925. In her autobiography, she stated that “her goal with landscape painting was to simplify everything. Eliminate every single detail that does not contribute to the design or to the interest of the composition as a whole. Everything in the painting must have its significance.” With her lithograph, Provincetown Houses, Berresford succeeded in paring down to the essential bones of her composition.
Virginia Berresford, painter, printmaker, and gallerist, was born on 11 October 1902 in New Rochelle, New York. In 1921 she attended Wellesley College, with a student exchange to Grenoble; and in 1923 she studied at Columbia University Teachers College. While studying at Columbia she took drawing classes with George Bridgeman at the Art Students League in New York. Berresford lived in Paris for four years between 1925 and 1930 where she studied with Amédée Ozenfant at Académie Moderne.
She married Benedict “Bob” Thielen and they traveled the western world. The couple returned to New York in 1933, and she had a solo exhibition at the Montross Gallery that same year. Berresford continued her studies with Ozenfant who was then teaching at the New School in New York.
Between 1927 and 1987, Berresford had forty-four solo exhibitions. She was included in the 46 Painters and Sculptors Under 35 Years of Age exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930; First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1933; Oil Paintings by Living Artists at the Brooklyn Museum in 1935; American Art Today, New York World’s Fair in 1939; The Fifty-second Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1941; the Second 1957 Show of the Provincetown Art Association; and Between the Wars: Women of the Whitney Studio Club and Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997.
Berresford was a private instructor in Menemsha, Maryland and, in 1954, opened the first commercial art gallery in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. In 1989 she authored Virginia's Journal: An Autobiography of an Artist which chronicles her life, work and travels.
The work of Virginia Berresford is represented in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Michigan; the Wolfsonian, Florida International University, Miami Beach; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Virginia Berresford died on 20 August 1994 in Martha's Vineyard.
