OAKLEY, Violet 1874-1961

PERSONAL:

Born June 10, 1874, in Bergen Heights, NJ; died February 25, 1961, in Philadelphia, PA; daughter of Arthur Edmund and Cornelia Swain Oakley. Education: Attended Art Students League, New York, NY, 1892; attended Académie Montparnasse, Paris, France, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; studied art in England with Charles Lazar; attended Drexel Institute (Philadelphia, PA). Religion: Christian Scientist.

CAREER:

Artist, designer, and author. Illustrator, 1897-1902; stained-glass window and mural designer, 1899-1961; taught design and mural decoration, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1913-17; self-appointed ambassador to League of Nations, 1927-30.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Gold Medal and Silver Medal, St. Louis Exposition, 1904; Gold Medal of Honor, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), 1905; Medal of Honor, Panama-Pacific Exposition, 1915; Medal of Honor, Architectural League of New York, 1916; Philadelphia Prize, PAFA, 1922; Joseph Pennell Memorial Medal, Philadelphia Water Color Club, 1932; Walter Lippincott Prize, PAFA, 1940; Emily Drayton Taylor Medal, Society of Miniature Painters, 1941; Woodmere Prize, Woodmere Gallery, 1947; Gold Medal, Springside School, 1947; Mary Smith Prize, PAFA, 1948; honorary doctor of laws degree, Drexel Institute, 1948; Gold Medal as distinguished daughter of Pennsylvania, 1950.

WRITINGS:

Cathedral of Compassion: Dramatic Outline of the Life of Jane Addams, 1860-1935, Press of Lyon & Armor (Philadelphia, PA), 1915.

The Holy Experiment: A Message to the World from Pennsylvania, privately printed (Philadelphia, PA), 1922.

International Supplement and Key to the Holy Experiment in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, privately printed (Philadelphia, PA), circa 1922.

Law Triumphant: Containing the Opening of the Book of the Law and the Miracle of Geneva, privately printed (Philadelphia, PA), 1933.

La présence divine a la société des nations, Kundig (Geneva, Switzerland), 1937.

Samuel F. B. Morse: A Dramatic Outline of the Life of the Father of Telegraphy and the Founder of the National Academy of Design, Cogslea Studio Publications (Philadelphia, PA), 1939.

Great Women of the Bible: A Series of Paintings in the Room of the Pastoral Aid Society: First Presbyterian Church, Germantown, Philadelphia, Eldon (Philadelphia, PA), 1949.

The Holy Experiment: Our Heritage from William Penn, Cogslea Studio Publications (Philadelphia, PA), 1950.

SELECTED BOOKS ILLUSTRATED:

(With Jessie Willcox Smith) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, Houghton, Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1897.

Elizabeth Phipps Train, A Marital Liability, Lippincott (Philadelphia PA), 1897.

Amlie Rives Troubetzkoy, A Damsel Errant, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1898.

Charles King, From School to Battle-field: A Story of the War Days, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1899.

Charles Montgomery Skinner, Do-nothing Days, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1899.

Charled Montgomery Skinner, With Feet to the Earth, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1899.

Lucy Bethia Walford, A Little Legacy, and Other Stories, Herbert S. Stone (Chicago, IL), 1899.

Contributor to periodical publications including: Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's, Harper's, Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, Philadelphia Press, Everybody's, Book Buyer, St. Nicholas, Century, Scribner's, Architectural League Yearbook, American Magazine of Art, International Studio, Mentor, Christian Science Monitor, New York Herald Tribune, National Geographic, Survey Graphic, Philadelphia Forum, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

SIDELIGHTS:

Violet Oakley, while best known for her religion-based murals and stained-glass designs, was also a quality magazine and book illustrator. Oakley's career began with illustrations for magazines such as Everybody's Magazine, Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, and Harper's Weekly. Critics were impressed with her draftsmanship and expression. Although Oakley's earnest religious themes eventually became outdated, she transcended fashion with her meticulous, imaginative work. As Susan Hamburger wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Oakley—a versatile portraitist, illustrator, stained-glass artisan, and muralist—earned a reputation as the first American woman artist to succeed in the predominantly male architectural field of mural decoration.…Her strong commitment to her religion and world peace influenced her art as well as her life."

Oakley's grandfathers, George Oakley and William Swain, were members of the National Academy of Design, and several of her family members had studied art abroad. Oakley, in a newspaper interview, said she was drawn to book illustration in a former life. She explained: "The abbesses and sisters were too busy nursing the sick and doing fine needleworks. I never heard of them illuminating manuscripts. I am quite sure I was a monk."

Oakley received little formal education; her parents, worrying about her asthma and general fragility, thought college would be too exhausting. Still, Oakley began to study at the Art Students League in New York in 1892; three years later she traveled to Europe with her parents and studied in England and in Paris at the Académie Montparnasse. Upon returning home she continued to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It became a home base, providing Oakley with exhibitions, teaching appointments, and honors throughout her career.

While she was studying in Philadelphia, Oakley's father became ill and her family's income fell; she had to work as an illustrator to support herself. She began to sell drawings to McClure's, Harper's, and Woman's Home Companion. Oakley studied practical illustration with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute, where she learned to draw from ideas, research details, and imagine the emotional valences of each piece. Hamburger wrote: "Pyle's stylistic influence is readily apparent in Oakley's large, expressive figures in a shallow space; broad, flat areas; draftsmanship; and design sense." In many illustrations, she merged detail with a frieze-like design, giving viewers a sense of history in patterned, meaningful design.

Oakley also published much of her work in books, including drawings for Elizabeth Phipps Train's A Marital Liability, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, and Charles King's From School to Battle-field: A Story of the War Days. Oakley used charcoal drawings, sometimes overlaying watercolors, and included detail—a specific pattern on a chair covering, for example—drawn into an overall design. Hamburger remarked, "Oakley's signature style, reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, executed on a grand scale in her murals, appeared early in her book-illustration work."

During the late 1890s, Oakley began producing her trademark stained-glass windows. She also began to live with fellow artists Jessie H. Dowd, Jessie Willcox Smith, and later Elizabeth Shippen Green. Eventually, the artists moved to the Red Rose Inn in Villanova, outside Philadelphia, seeking a quiet, rural area in which to paint. Having converted from the Episcopalian Church to Christian Science, she credited faith for her childhood asthma abating.

In 1902 architect Joseph Miller Huston commissioned Oakley to paint eighteen murals in the governor's reception room in the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg. At the time, this was the largest public commission a woman artist in the United States had yet received. Other such commissions followed, and in all, Oakley painted forty-three murals for the capitol that expressed her hope for "world peace, equal rights, and faith in the work of unification of the Peoples of the Earth."

In Oakley's most famous works she conveys a divine pattern of physical realities. In "The Vision of William Penn," for example, she researched seventeenth-century textiles to "express the religious feeling behind the founding of Pennsylvania," as art critic Malcolm Vaughn put it. Other critics found Oakley powerful, though at times somewhat stiff; an Art Digest reviewer commented on her 1942 exhibit: "Always astonishing in its virtuosity and variety, her art has the great common denominator of an idealism that can be read into an army altar triptych defined for the battlefield a message of peace …If at times, her idealism of character robs it of personal punch, it also goes behind personality to what Miss Oakley herself believes—that there is a noble idealism in human nature."

Oakley, who died with projects unfinished, won awards as well as criticism from peers. But she kept designing the kinds of murals and stained-glass work that expressed her beliefs, and spent some time drawing members of the League of Nations as a self-appointed American delegate. She also created twenty-five portable triptychs for Army and Navy chapels during World War II. Oakley's work reflected her own beliefs and the sense that art could communicate the divine.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Catherine Connell Stryker, The Studios at Cogslea, Delaware Art Museum, February 20-March 28, 1976, Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington, DE), 1976.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 188: American Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998, pp. 221-229.

PERIODICALS

Art Digest, March 15, 1942, "Woodmere Gallery Review."

Arts, February, 1930, Forbes Watson, "In the Galleries: 33 Moderns and Violet Oakley," p. 423; October, 1979, Helen Goodman, "Violet Oakley," p. 7.*