Background
Pamela Ruby Bianco was born on New Year"s Eve in the Barnes district of London, the daughter of an Italian scholar and bookseller, Francesco Bianco, and an English writer, Margery Williams Bianco (author of The Velveteen Rabbit).
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Pamela Bianco
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She was educated at home, though home for the Biancos was a shifting location, as the family lived in France, Italy, and the United States when Pamela was a child.
Career
Her paintings and drawings were first exhibited as part of a children"s show in Turin. Then in London in 1919, and in New York City in 1921. After shows in several American cities, she returned to New York City for a more mature show when she was seventeen years old, at the Knoedler Gallery.
Among her early patrons were John Galsworthy, Walter de la Mare, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Nina Wilcox Putnam, and Jo Davidson.
In 1928 a children"s edition of poems from William Blake"s Songs of Innocence, selected and illustrated by Pamela Bianco, was published. Books written and illustrated by Bianco include The Starlit Journey: A Story (1933), Playtime in Cherry Street (1948), Books illustrated by Bianco include Oscar Wilde"s The Birthday of the Infanta (1930), Glenway Wescott"s Natives of Rock (1925), and Hazeltine and Smith, The Easter Book of Legends and Stories (1947), She also illustrated several books by her mother, including The Skin Horse, The Adventures of Andy, and The Little Wooden Doll.
Bianco received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930. Bianco married twice.
She remarried in 1955 to fellow artist George Theodore Hartmann.
He died in 1976. She had one son, Lorenzo Bianco Schlick, who became a dancer best known for appearing in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway and in the film version. Larry Bianco (as he was known professionally) died in April 1994, and Pamela Bianco died later that same year, at the age of 87.
A retrospective exhibition of Pamela Bianco"s works was mounted in 2004 in London.
A small collection of Pamela Bianco"s papers, mostly illustrations, are at the University of Minnesota. Works by Pamela Bianco are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among other institutions and private collections.
