She was a pacifist and feminist who came of age during the women’s suffrage movement — and became the first American woman to be awarded a commission for a public mural. 

Born in 1874, Oakley spent more than 60 years creating a body of work that would transform American art — and parts of Northwest Philadelphia, including the Chestnut Hill Library, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, and the First Presbyterian Church in Germantown. 

Yet it’s at the Woodmere art museum where her legacy truly lives — with 3,000 pieces that include murals, portraits, and sketches. When Woodmere’s new Frances M. Maguire Hall for Art and Education opens this fall, a selection of these pieces will finally have a space worthy of their importance, celebrating an artist whose Philadelphia roots fed her vision and helped her flourish.

A force of nature

In May 1955, Oakley returned to the Pennsylvania State Capitol for a tour of the murals she spent 25 years creating. In a recording of her remarks that day, she shared an anecdote about a conversation with an Oxford University librarian.

Oakley had sailed to England to study the history of the ideals of William Penn and the Quakers, which would inform her creation of the murals. When she told the librarian she wanted to study the history of law, he replied that it had never been written. To which Oakley responded, in a determined, patrician-sounding voice, “Then I’ll have to write it!” 

The remark was typical of Oakley’s approach to life. By all accounts, she was a force of nature. By all accounts, she was a force of nature. A prolific artist and a leading figure in the American Renaissance art movement, Oakley was known for breaking barriers in mural decoration — an art form practiced exclusively by men.

When Oakley wanted to do something, “she just did it,” said Patricia Likos Ricci, professor of the history of art at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County and an authority on the artist’s life and work. “No one appointed her, she didn’t ask for permission. She was on a mission.”

Beyond being a renowned muralist, Oakley was also an illustrator, portrait painter, author, and stained glass designer.

Bill Valerio, CEO and director of Woodmere, who has been instrumental in acquiring works by the artist, said, “We’re incredibly honored to steward the legacy of Violet Oakley, to be the champions of her work. Her legacy is a piece of art and history that everyone in the community should be proud of.” 

Though well known early in her career because of the Pennsylvania Capitol murals, Oakley’s work fell into obscurity by the 1930s with the end of the American Renaissance movement and the advent of the Great Depression. But she continued to produce art, and through the efforts of Valerio, Likos Ricci, and others, works by Oakley are now in greater demand. 

Much of her work was created in Philadelphia, which she called home for more than 60 years. Oakley’s relationship with Woodmere and the city’s northwest communities is a special one that enabled her to put down roots and flourish as an artist.

An artistic family scarred by tragedy

The youngest of three girls, Oakley was born in Bergen Heights — now part of Jersey City, New Jersey — into a family of artists. Her father, Arthur Edmond Oakley, was a businessman and arts devotee. Her mother, Cornelia Swain, was a drawing teacher and portrait painter. Both of her grandfathers were members of the National Academy of Design. 

As a young woman, Oakley visited the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which drew national and international figures in the arts, showcased American power and values, and inspired the American Renaissance movement. 

“The great industrial cities of America were looking to Europe for inspiration, but they were also exploring new ways to enhance the country culturally, educationally, and intellectually,” says Valerio. “Her views on issues of the day became a big part of her thinking as she developed as an artist.”

After studying at the Art Students League of New York, Oakley went abroad with her family in December 1894. She visited aunts who were living at a villa in Tangier, Morocco, and relatives in Nice, France. Violet and her sister, Hester, took art classes in Paris and in the town of Rye in Sussex, England.

The spring prior to the family’s travels, Arthur Oakley started showing signs of what was then called neurasthenia: a vaguely defined mental and physical fatigue that could be accompanied by dizziness and other symptoms. In 1896, in search of medical treatment, the family moved to Philadelphia, where physician Silas Weir Mitchell had pioneered his so-called rest cure for psychiatric illnesses.

Despite what seemed like an idyllic life immersed in art and enriched by travel, the family was already scarred by tragedy and would be again. 

The eldest of the Oakley sisters, Cornelia, died at age 6 from diphtheria. Oakley’s father lost his job during the Panic of 1893 — a severe financial crisis that led to a national economic depression. Hester, who became a writer, died during a typhoid fever outbreak in Brooklyn, after losing her only child, Margaret, just 2 at the time. 

Arthur Oakley would pass away in 1900 at a psychiatric facility in Philadelphia, leaving Violet to assume financial responsibility for her mother.

“Growing up in an age when epidemics were happening and children were often the victims must have been terrifying for Oakley,” said Likos Ricci. The deaths in her family would have a profound impact on Oakley, who became obsessively fearful of illness. Raised in the Episcopal Church, she later converted to Christian Science. 

The Red Rose Girls

After the family moved to Philadelphia, Oakley attended classes taught by the renowned portrait painter Cecilia Beaux, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), on Broad Street in downtown Philadelphia. Later, she took an illustration class with legendary painter and illustrator Howard Pyle at Drexel University. 

There she met fellow students Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green, who became highly regarded illustrators. Smith and Green were both from Philadelphia (Smith was born in Mt. Airy). The young women became friends and shared a studio in the historic Love Building on Chestnut Street.

In 1902, the three art students, their friend Henrietta Cozens, Oakley’s mother, and Green’s parents took up residence at the Red Rose estate in Villanova. Dubbed the Red Rose Girls by Pyle, their living arrangement as a group of single women was unconventional for the time. With support from Cozens, who managed the household, the artist trio worked as illustrators, helping to establish Philadelphia as a national center for book and magazine illustration.

The same year, at age 28, Oakley was awarded the mural commission for the Governor’s Reception Room at the new Pennsylvania State Capitol. Later, when the muralist for the Senate and Supreme Court chambers passed away, Oakley was selected to create the murals for those rooms too. In all, she created 43 murals for the American Renaissance-style building in Harrisburg. 

In the reception room murals, Oakley depicted the story of Penn and the founding of Pennsylvania. For the Senate chamber murals, she showed how Quaker principles — particularly nonviolence and racial equality — played a role in the founding of the state. In one of the murals, she illustrated the story of a Quaker who bought a ship of enslaved Africans and took them to freedom in Nova Scotia, Canada, where slavery was illegal.

The Woodwards 

On quiet Saint George’s Road in West Mt. Airy, a historical marker dedicated to the artist stands in front of Cogslea, the property to which Oakley, Smith, Green, and Cozens moved in 1906. Renovated by architect Frank Miles Day, the property was a ramshackle farm with a 19th-century house and adjacent barn.

Day renovated the property at the request of George Woodward, who invited the Red Rose Girls to live there. Woodward and his wife, Gertrude — wealthy and socially progressive — were Oakley’s most important private patrons and among her closest friends. A doctor, Woodward was the primary real estate developer of the new Philadelphia suburbs of Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy.

Valerio explained, “The Woodwards, who played an incredibly important role in American art, built Chestnut Hill as a community that would embrace the arts, and Oakley was a big part of that.”

Oakley, who once described her life as a “pilgrimage of a painter seeking peace,” spent three years in Geneva, Switzerland after World War I creating portraits of the assembled League of Nations delegates from around the world. Published by the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, many of the portraits were acquired by Woodmere. Oakley was keenly disappointed that the U.S. never joined the international organization.

Oakley was known to have said, “In time I became so impressed by the belief or testimony of the Quakers against carnal warfare that this idea, the victory of law, or truth over force, became the central idea of my life.”

A partner in art and life

In 1918, Oakley invited Edith Emerson, who worked as her studio assistant, to live with her at Cogslea. Emerson also attended PAFA, where she took a mural painting class taught by the artist.

An excellent painter in her own right, Emerson became the director of Woodmere in 1940, formalizing its mission to focus on the arts and artists of Philadelphia. Oakley died in 1961 at age 86 in a Christian Science nursing home in West Mt. Airy. Emerson remained at Cogslea and continued serving as Woodmere’s director until 1978.

Likos Ricci first discovered works by Oakley and Emerson at a PAFA exhibit in the 1970s that featured their work and that of other female artists associated with the longtime arts institution. 

Likos Ricci recalled the first time she set foot in the studio at Cogslea. There, she met Emerson just before the director retired from Woodmere. “It was kind of a shrine to Oakley,” Likos Ricci said. “It felt as though she had just walked out of the room and Edith was living with her ghost.”

After World War II, Oakley and Emerson could no longer afford to live in the house at Cogslea and started using the barn as both studio and residence. When Day renovated the barn, he added features that gave the space an Italianate quality: doors studded with nailheads and a sink in a small alcove reminiscent of an old building. Later, the studio roof was raised to accommodate Oakley’s murals.

Oakley and Emerson lived on the building’s first floor. The studio, with its high ceilings, was on the second floor. Studies for murals lined the upper part of the walls; easels on the floor held more studies and paintings.

As the caretaker of Oakley’s legacy, Emerson had saved a lifetime of her partner’s correspondence, drawings, paintings, portfolios, and commission documents “in an almost obsessive way,” said Likos Ricci. “She was so concerned that this collection she had stewarded all those years would be lost.”

Likos Ricci worked with Emerson for about 10 years, becoming a close friend and helping her organize the collection. She described Oakley as “a fanatical sketcher,” who prepared numerous drawings and studies for her commissioned pieces, but recalled many of Oakley’s drawings “were verging on a crisis state,” on paper that was “dusty, brittle, and browning.”

Eventually, Oakley’s letters, photos, and professional correspondence went to the Archives of American Art. Her artwork went to institutions that included Woodmere, PAFA, the Delaware Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art.

Hidden gems and a new home

One of the most stunning sets of murals created by Oakley is in the meeting room of the First Presbyterian Church in Germantown. Titled “Women of the Bible,” the murals — spread over three walls — depict figures from stories such as the Annunciation and Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman.

Tucked away in the church on Chelten Avenue, the murals are painted in brilliant shades of blue, gold, red, and orange. In one, Oakley depicts Satan as a sinister-looking snake, its teeth clenching the stem of an apple dangling over Eve’s head. Oakley was over 70 when she started the murals in 1945. She completed them in 1949.

When Woodmere’s Maguire Hall opens, works by Oakley on display will include a portrait of Emerson, the artist’s “Building the House of Wisdom” murals, and studies for murals at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy. 

In 1910, banker Charlton Yarnall commissioned Oakley to create the “House of Wisdom” murals and a stained glass dome for his new neo-renaissance mansion at 17th and Locust streets in Philadelphia. The murals, which include three half-moon-shaped lunettes, six octagons, and four triangle pendentives, depict the stages of human development.

Inspired by Proverbs 9:1, “Wisdom hath buildeth her house,” Oakley created an allegorical work in which the stages of human development correspond to the stages of civilization. Oakley equated wisdom with goodness; children who are raised with moral values become civic-minded adults who contribute to the good of society.

Emerson had the chance to have the murals removed when the American Red Cross bought the mansion in the 1960s and offered them as a gift to Woodmere. Twelve of the 13 murals were taken, but “The High Tower” pendentive remained in place because it was glued to the wall with very strong adhesive, sanded, and painted over with house paint. 

In 2017, the building’s new owner — real estate developer and former Philadelphia City Councilmember Allan Domb — gave Woodmere permission to remove the pendentive. Rick Ortwein, Woodmere deputy director for exhibitions, cut into plaster walls to remove it. Art conservator Steven Erisoty, who has restored many paintings for Woodmere, carefully removed layers of house paint to discover that the finished piece was gone, but an earlier version showed Oakley’s intent and process for the painting.

Of all of Oakley’s murals, Likos Ricci said the “House of Wisdom” murals are her favorite because “their theme is so beautiful. I think they are among her most insightful compositions and show that she had a clear sense of the importance of fundamental ideals.”

Oakley’s work, with its themes of world peace, disarmament, and antiracism, is more important than ever, she said. “Violet Oakley is a force for good in the world.” 

For more information, visit The Violet Oakley Experience at woodmereartmuseum.org/the-violet-oakley-experience, which allows viewers to access the more than 3,000 works of art in Woodmere’s Oakley collection.