Background

Violet Oakley was born on June 10, 1875, in Bergen Heights, New Jersey, the daughter of Arthur Edmund and Cornelia Swain Oakley. 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.

Education

Violet 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 of New York in 1892. Three years later, she traveled to Europe with her parents and studied in England with Charles Lazar and Paris at the Académie Montparnasse. Upon returning home, Oakley continued to learn at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Also, Violet Oakley attended Drexel Institute, where she studied practical illustration with Howard Pyle. Additionally, she learned to extract ideas, research details, imagine the emotional valences of each piece.

Career

Violet Oakley was an illustrator from 1897 to 1902. Her 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 craftsmanship and expression. Although Oakley's earnest religious themes eventually became outdated, she transcended fashion with her meticulous, imaginative work.

While Oakley was studying in Philadelphia, her 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. In many illustrations, Oakley 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 Battlefield: A Story of the War Days. She used charcoal drawings, sometimes overlaying watercolors, and included detail, a specific pattern on a chair covering, for example, drawn into an overall design.

In 1899 Oakley began producing her trademark stained-glass windows. She also began to live with fellow artists Jessie Dowd, Jessie Willcox Smith, and later Elizabeth Shippen Green. Eventually, the artists moved to the Red Rose Inn in Villanova to seeking a quiet and rural area where they could paint.

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 Violet Oakley's most famous works, she conveys a divine pattern of physical realities. In The Vision of William Penn, she researched seventeenth-century textiles to express the religious feeling behind the founding of Pennsylvania. Besides, she designed the kinds of murals and stained-glass work that showed 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. Additionally, she was a contributor to periodical publications including Ladies' Home Journal, Philadelphia Press, 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. Moreover, Oakley taught design and mural decoration at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 1913-1917.

Achievements

• Violet Oakley was best known for her religion-based murals and stained-glass designs. She was also one of three women to receive the Gold Medal of Honor for distinguished service from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1905. She also received the Gold Medal and Silver Medal from the Saint Louis Exposition in 1904, the Medal of Honor from the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, and the Medal of Honor from the Architectural League of New York in 1916. Also, Oakley was a holder of the Philadelphia Prize in 1922, the Walter Lippincott Prize in 1940, and the Mary Smith Prize in 1948 from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
  
  Other Oakley's honors and awards included the Joseph Pennell Memorial Medal from the Philadelphia Water Color Club in 1932, the Emily Drayton Taylor Medal from the Society of Miniature Painters in 1941, the Woodmere Prize from the Woodmere Gallery in 1947, the Gold Medal from the Springside School in 1947, and the Gold Medal as the distinguished daughter of Pennsylvania in 1950. She also earned an honorary doctor of laws degree from the Drexel Institute in 1948 and was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1966.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Evangeline

    (Violet Oakley was an illustrator of the book.)

    1897
  • A Marital Liability

    (Violet Oakley was an illustrator of the book.)

    1897
  • A Damsel Errant

    (Violet Oakley was an illustrator of the book.)

    1898
  • From School to Battlefield

    (Violet Oakley was an illustrator of the book.)

    1899
  • Do-Nothing Days

    (Violet Oakley was an illustrator of the book.)

    1899
  • A Little Legacy & Other Stories

    (Violet Oakley was an illustrator of the book.)

    1899
  • Cathedral of Compassion 1915
  • The Holy Experiment 1922
  • Law Triumphant 1933
  • Samuel F. B. Morse 1939
  • The Holy Experiment: Our Heritage from William Penn 1950

Religion

Having converted from the Episcopalian Church to Christian Science in 1903, Violet Oakley credited faith for her childhood asthma abating. She was a member of Second Church of Christ, Scientist, Philadelphia from 1912 to 1961.

Politics

Violet Oakley was a supporter of the Quaker William Penn. She became a follower of the Quaker principles of pacifism, equality of the races and sexes, economic and social justice, and international government. Moreover, Oakley was a self-appointed ambassador to the League of Nations in 1927-1930 and a proponent of nuclear disarmament after World War II.

Views

Violet Oakley was a pacifist and a feminist, and her works focused on the themes of world peace and human rights.

Membership

• 

  The Plastic Club , United States

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Violet Oakley had asthma.

Quotes from others about the person

• "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." - Susan Hamburger

Interests

• Politicians

  William Penn

Connections

Father:

Arthur Edmund Oakley

Mother:

Cornelia Swain Oakley

colleague:

Jessie Willcox Smith

Jessie Willcox Smith was an American artist best remembered for her illustrations, often featuring children, for numerous popular magazines, advertising campaigns, and children's books.

colleague:

Elizabeth Shippen Green

Elizabeth Shippen Green was one of the earliest female illustrators to win high regard, helping to open the door a little wider for the women who followed her.

Sister:

Hester Oakley

colleague:

Jessie H. Dowd

References

• Violet Oakley: An Artist's Life
  2016