Background
Charlotte F. Kennedy was born in Kingston, New York, the daughter of Gilbert F. Kennedy (a lawyer) and Helen McCormick Kennedy (an illustrator).
Charlotte F. Kennedy was born in Kingston, New York, the daughter of Gilbert F. Kennedy (a lawyer) and Helen McCormick Kennedy (an illustrator).
She was educated at the Art Students League and at Cooper Union in the 1920s.
Her "beautiful but heartbreaking" illustrations for John Milton"s Paradise Lost were published in 1936. Milton scholar Virginia Tufte made a biographical film about Petrina, titled Reaching for Paradise: The Life and Art of Carlotta Petrina (1994). Petrina also illustrated editions of Norman Douglas"s South Wind (1932), Shakespeare"s Henry VI, Participant 2, and the John Dryden translation of Virgil"s Aeneid (1944), She made some illustrations for an edition of Charles Dickens"s Oliver Twist, but they were not used in the final publication.
Drawings by Carlotta Petrina were included in the second Whitney Biennial in 1933.
Among her quirkier projects, she illustrated a short humorous novel called Clovis by Michael Fessier (1948), about a parrot with human intelligence. John was born Giovanni Antonio Secondo Petrina in Treviso, Italy.
They had a son, Antonio. John died in 1935, in a car accident, while the Petrinas were traveling in Wyoming.
Carlotta Petrina died in 1997, age 96, in Brownsville, Texas.