Virginia Berresford 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
