Virginia Berresford 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; Greenville Museum of Art 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.

Virginia Berresford’s career spanned both American and Parisian institutions, various teaching positions and several solo exhibitions within the United States. Berresford was born in 1902 in New Rochelle, New York. Her studies took place at Wellesley College, with a student exchange to Grenoble; Teachers College; Columbia University under Charles Martin; the Art Students League; and with Amédée Ozenfant through the Académie Moderne in Paris, where she lived from 1925-1926 and 1929-1930. 

While in Paris, Berresford became acquainted with the works of Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, Derain and Vuillard. Her influences ranged from Mozart and Beethoven to Keats and Whitman. She greatly admired artists from O’Keeffe to Rousseau, Picasso and Kandinsky and most importantly Ozenfant, one of the founding artists of Purism under whom she studied extensively. 

Throughout her life, Berresford also found several opportunities to travel to Venice, Athens and Munich, which greatly impacted her aesthetic sensibility in landscape painting. Exhibitions in which Berresford participated include: the Bernheim Gallery, Paris; Society of Independent Artists, World’s Fair, Museum of Modern Art, Montclair Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Salons of America and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. 

Her first exhibit in New York was at the Dudensing Gallery. It was there she met Frank Crowninshield, who bought several paintings and published one on the cover of Vanity Fair. They would later become friends and spend a great deal of time together in Paris and New York.

Solo exhibitions of Berresford’s work were held by The New Gallery, NYC; Montross Gallery, Walker Gallery, NYC; Mortimer Levitt Gallery, NYC; Berresford Gallery, Massachusetts; Princeton Gallery of Fine Arts, Jacques Seligman Gallery, NYC; Marie Sterner Gallery; Bodley Gallery; Dunbarton Gallery; Bonestall Gallery, Farnsworth Art Museum, Wellesley College; Menemsha Gallery; Studio West Art Gallery; College of St. Thomas; Princeton Gallery of Fine Art; and several others in Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York. 

Selected works have been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Detroit Museum, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, and dozens of private collections. 

Berresford was a private instructor in Menemsha, Maryland, and opened the first commercial art gallery in Martha’s Vineyard where she died in 1994. Her work has been reviewed by critics and established artists in The Arts, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Vineyard Gazette, The New Yorker, and Boston Globe. In 1989 Berresford published an autobiography, Virginia’s Journal, which chronicles her life, work and travels.

An important source for modern and contemporary American & European Art in East Hampton, New York & worldwide, Vered Gallery's spectacular wide-ranging inventory consists of unique paintings, drawings, large & small scale sculpture, monotypes, prints and photographs  by Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Richard Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Fernando Botero, Cartier-Bresson, Marc Chagall, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Winslow Homer, Wolf Kahn, Jeff Koons, Fernand Leger, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Thomas Moran, Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Bert Stern, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, Carleton E Watkins, Tom Wesselmann and Andrew Wyeth.

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