"Violette Consented Willingly to Pass the Night in the Forest"

— Our Virginia Sterret Series Plate #2 

Virginia Frances Sterrett was 19 years old and recently diagnosed with tuberculosis when Penn Publishing handed her the commission for this book. She completed the full plate series anyway. Three major works. Death at 30. The illustrations she made for this 1920 volume are the ones that have lasted, compared with those of Kay Nielsen, and are still circulating in art history discussions a century later.

Violette Consented Willingly to Pass the Night in the Forest — Virginia Frances Sterrett 1920 Wooden Puzzle

Virginia Frances Sterrett was 19 years old when she drew this. Bedridden with tuberculosis in a Chicago sanitarium, drawing on borrowed energy for a deadline she needed to meet to keep her family fed. The illustration came out in 1920. She died ten years later, at 30. The work outlasted her by a century.

📖 The Story Behind This Piece

This is not the lightest illustration in the collection. It is the most haunting.

Ourson is a boy cursed at birth — born covered in bristles like a wild boar, unable to be touched without causing pain, too aware of the horror he inspires in other children. Violette is the girl who found him in the forest anyway — lost, fallen from the dog she'd been riding, exhausted — and chose not to run. When Ourson wept from shame, Violette kissed his hairy cheek. "You see, little cub, that Violette is no longer afraid."

This illustration captures the moment before that tenderness — the moment of decision. Violette lies collapsed on the forest floor in her white dress, golden hair fanning across the dark ground. Ourson crouches beside her in his extraordinary red patterned costume, head bent, not touching her. A single star burns in the upper right of that midnight blue sky. The forest around them is all twisted Art Nouveau trees with dotted bark, hanging moss, rock formations that look half-alive. It is a scene of radical stillness inside a world of visual complexity.

Readers who know this story call Ourson and Violette the emotional heart of the collection — a tale about loving someone the world finds unlovable, and what that costs. Ségur wrote it in her sixties. Sterrett illustrated it at nineteen, sick, working from a bed. The tenderness in the image is not accidental.

🧩 Why This Illustration Works as a Puzzle

This is the most technically demanding piece in the Old French Fairy Tales series. The midnight blue dominates roughly 60% of the composition — sky, rock face, shadowed ground — and within that blue there are dozens of tonal variations, from near-black to soft cobalt, that are invisible at screen resolution and fully present on UV-printed wood. You are sorting blue against blue against blue, guided only by the slight shift in value that Sterrett built into her watercolor wash layer by layer.

The twisted trees on either side are their own problem — the dotted bark pattern repeating across both left and right sides with just enough variation to make each piece feel almost right until it isn't. The single bright star in the upper right is one of the few clear anchor points. Most assemblers find Violette's white dress and golden hair first, then work outward into the dark.

This illustration is part of the Virginia Frances Sterrett Old French Fairy Tales Collection.

See all four →

• PLATE#1 Blondine in the Forest 
  
• PLATE#3 Henry and the Genius of the Mountain 
• PLATE #4 Blondine & the White Deer

🎁 Who Gets One of These

A few specific people keep buying this one.

✔️ The Art Nouveau collector who owns Mucha prints but wants something three-dimensional — Sterrett's linework sits in direct conversation with that tradition, and assembling it piece by piece is a different kind of study than hanging it.
✔️ The children's book illustrator or design student who keeps Nielsen and Dulac on their shelf — Sterrett is the name missing from most of those collections, and this is a good argument for adding her.
✔️ The person buying a gift for someone who reads fairy tale scholarship, not just fairy tales — the 1920 Penn edition has a specific cultural history; this isn't generic fantasy art.
✔️ The museum member who's been in a Golden Age of Illustration exhibition and left wishing they could take something home — reproductions at that quality level usually cost $300 or more in a museum shop.
✔️ The puzzler who has finished every Ravensburger in the house and wants something that stays out afterward — the wooden box and the image both earn a permanent spot.

🧩 Puzzle Specifications

✔️ Precision laser-cut wooden pieces
✔️ 3mm MDF core — rigid, warp-resistant, built to last
✔️ UV printing directly on wood — no paper laminate, no peeling
✔️ Traditional grid-cut design
✔️ Sizes: 15"x23", 18"x24", 23"x31"
✔️ Piece counts: 300–1000
✔️ Handcrafted wooden keepsake box included
✔️ Made to order — ships in 3–4 weeks

💎 Why This Puzzle Lasts

Most wooden puzzle makers charge $300 to $500. The craft justifies it. WAWW gets to the same quality differently: direct manufacturing, no wholesale chain, made to order with no warehouse sitting between production and your door. Same 3mm MDF. Same UV printing. No markup layered in for a retailer who never touched it.

The 3mm MDF core is what keeps a puzzle alive past the first year. Cardboard warps, softens, and eventually won't lie flat. MDF holds its shape under pressure and humidity, which means the pieces fit the same way in 2044 as they do when you open the box. You feel that rigidity immediately when you pick up a piece — there's no flex, no give, just a clean wooden tab that clicks into place and stays.

UV printing bonds ink directly to the wood surface, so there's no paper laminate to bubble, crack, or peel away from the edges after a few years. For Sterrett's pale watercolor washes specifically, that matters — a laminate layer flattens delicate tonal gradations; direct printing preserves them. The traditional grid cut keeps solving clean and satisfying: no whimsy pieces, no arbitrary shapes, just a well-fitted puzzle that holds together once assembled. The handcrafted wooden keepsake box is sized for the finished puzzle and built to the same standard as the pieces themselves. Most people keep it. Every puzzle is made to order, which is why the wait is 3 to 4 weeks. Nothing sits in a warehouse going soft.