Vera Willoughby

Vera Willoughby (1870–1939) was a British illustrator, painter, and poster artist. Under the name Vera Petrovna, she also created designs and illustrations of ballet dancers. Willoughby designed posters for the London Underground from 1928 to 1935. She made illustrations for a gift edition of The Odes of Horace, added "curiously stylised illustrations" for a 1929 edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, "decorated" a collection of 17th-century love poems, and contributed illustrations for ten books published by Peter Llewelyn Davies, among her many published works. Beginning in 1915, she created cover designs for the catalogues and other publications of specialty bookseller and dance scholar Cyril W. Beaumont, sometimes under the name "Vera Petrovna". She also created wooden souvenir figures depicting dancers Léonide Massine and Lubov Tchernicheva of the Ballets Russes.