Dr. Bailey Van Hook is an art history professor and the co-chair of the Master’s program in Material Culture and Public Humanities at Virginia Tech. She is also the author of the first full-length biography of artist Violet Oakley (1874-1961). During her fifteen years of research, Van Hook traveled widely pursuing the complete story behind the muralist, illustrator, stained glass artist, portraitist and author. Violet Oakley: An Artist’s Life was published by University of Delaware Press.

Explain how you became interested in Violet Oakley for the subject of a biography—how does her story fit in with your wider interests?

My field of art history is the art of the United States, especially the late 19th and early 20th century. I wrote a book on on beaux-arts mural painting, The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917 (Ohio University Press, 2003).

What was especially striking to me was how the movement was a man’s game. This was partly a result of the particular way that murals were commissioned and executed. Instead of dealing with a patron, the artists interacted with architects, building commissioners, and elected officials. Contracts were drawn up and bond was posted. The muralists had to climb scaffolding and use Big Brushes. All of that seemed to preclude women. So Violet Oakley was arguably the only female artist who was professionally involved in their creation almost her entire life. Her murals cycles were extensive, scholarly and heavily researched (all this with only a high school education!) but at the same time beautifully designed and executed, with an extraordinary sense of color and command of composition.

I started with the idea of writing an art history monograph but gradually turned to biography. I have always loved the genre, and have been reading them since I was about twelve. Since then I have read dozens, especially enjoying the work of Hermione Lee and Linda Lear. Biography was also, frankly, a new way of writing for me. I had already written two art history monographs and was eager to challenge myself in a different genre.

Although unusual and unforeseen, Oakley was chosen to create murals for the Pennsylvania state house. Can you explain the circumstances which led to this huge commission?

Joseph Huston, the architect of the statehouse, was on record as saying that a woman should be commissioned to paint one of the spaces—although not a major one like the dome or the legislative rooms. Just the year before, 1901, Oakley had gotten a lot of good press for her first mural, The Heavenly Host, for a church in Manhattan. So I think she was on his radar. It was also important that she was living in Pennsylvania since Huston chose artists who had been born in the state or were currently a resident.

But on the other hand, she was only 28, and relatively inexperienced in large scale “decoration,” as it was called. It was a difficult art form because the muralist produced small sketches, and had to size them up substantially, all the while being able to envision how they would appear when installed. One of the most notable male muralists, Robert Reid, was quoted as saying “she may make a good looking sketch, but she’ll never be able to execute it in the large, because she hasn’t the masculine mind”!

Oakley received the commission to paint the Governor’s reception room, one of the smaller spaces, but even so 71 by 27 feel (and muralists were paid by the square foot). Her narrative cycle started with the Protestant Reformation, the printing of the first English Bible, and ended with William Penn’s first sight of the colony. She believed that its intellectual and religious history was the true foundation of the state.

Those murals became very popular, although she did get in trouble with some leading Pennsylvania Catholics for her reformation slant. Their success was the major reason she was chosen to paint two remaining spaces, the Senate and the Supreme Court, when the muralist Edwin Austin Abbey died suddenly in 1911. And this time she was paid at the same rate!

Her published work equally deals with memorializing prominent individuals and events, including examples of historical pageants. Can you explain the phenomenon of pageants for those who might not be familiar with them?

Oakley was responsible for designing two major pageants, the first, in 1908, for the 225th anniversary of the founding of Pennsylvania. The original idea, to gather large numbers of people together to recreate historical events was English. Oakley was the “designer and art director,” and designed horse-drawn floats, each illustrating an episode from the state’s history. Also her mural for the Governor’s reception room could be seen as really in the guise of a pageant - historical episodes that could be translated into pageant floats! I would imagine the effect was almost cinematic.

For the Philadelphia pageant, Oakley produced over five dozen large charcoal and watercolor sketches on heavy cardboard, elaborately detailed in costume and setting. She then supervised the construction and painting of the floats, which took over ten weeks with sixty people working on them. All that work culminated in the one-day pageant in the streets of Central Philadelphia, with almost a million people attending. It was so successful that she was asked to design another pageant the following year, 1909, on the history of Westchester County, a benefit for the construction of a hospital in Bronxville. But by the time she finished the Pennsylvania state house commission, in 1927, historical pageants had gone out of fashion so she was never asked to do another.

There are a few themes which run throughout Oakley’s work—a reverence for history, but also pacifism and religion. During the 20th Century, Oakley became involved with the world peace movement and the United Nations. She created wartime altarpieces and published under the auspices of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom. How did this activity build upon her earlier work?

The triptychs Oakley created during WWII were ironically for military sites, training facilities, airfields, battle ships and the like. I call her a “pacifist patriot.” She created 24 out of almost 300 commissioned by a private group, the Citizens Committee for the Army and the Navy. They were portable, creating a makeshift religious site anywhere. She loved the work since it combined her strong spiritual nature with a format rooted in tradition, which she could nevertheless update (they sometimes featured planes and ships). Unfortunately many of the triptychs are now unlocated and may have been discarded when camps were closed or ships decommissioned.

Oakley’s three mural cycles for the Pennsylvania Capitol built on the idea of cooperation between different groups, the different religions all allowed to coexist peacefully in Pennsylvania; the Constitutional Convention and the reunification of the states after the Civil War; and in the Senate, the history of the law, culminating in the International Court at the Hague (she would have preferred the League of Nations but it was too controversial) and world disarmament. Oakley made much of the fact that William Penn had conceived of a “Parliament of Nations,” which she believed foreshadowed the League. After she finished the Senate murals, she visited the League for three sessions, drawing the delegates and producing The Geneva Drawings (she preferred the “Miracle at Geneva”).

Oakley admired Jane Addams and the group she helped to found, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She later met her at Hull House in Chicago and drew a pastel portrait. Although Addams died in 1935, Oakley remained devoted to her memory and eagerly participated in the production of a calendar created to raise funds for the WILPF, which featured her portrait of Addams. This lead to her “dramatic outline,” as Oakley called it, of Jane Addams’s life, Cathedral of Compassion.

Toward the very end of her life, she created a version, much reduced in size and cost, of a book she had authored in 1922, The Holy Experiment (Penn’s term for his colony). She was able to donate copies to all the countries on the United Nations’ Disarmament commission and actually visited the UN to present them. To her, this accomplishment represented the culmination of her life’s work.

Although born in New York, Violet Oakley spent most of her life in Pennsylvania alongside other artists. Can you describe her community?

In 1902, just before she received the Capitol commission, Oakley established a home, the “Red Rose,” in Villa Nova with two other artists, Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green, and a fourth, Henrietta Cozens, who acted as housekeeper (or the wife that Virginia Woolf said all artists needed!). The Red Rose was a former inn and very much in the style of the English periodical, Country Life. It was an idyllic time for all of them but unfortunately only lasted four years before they were evicted by the owner who wanted to build another house on the estate.

The group moved to Mount Airy and built a home, Cogslea (from their initials), which replicated the domestic arrangement of the Red Rose. Eventually Green married and Jessie Willcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens moved to a house close by. “Lower Cogslea” had originally been Oakley’s studio but when she was hard up (as she often was!) she rented the main house and she and her former student and companion Edith Emerson moved into the studio. It was an incredible space, 50 feet square, designed for the creation of her large murals. They hosted lectures and musicales there for over thirty years. Theirs was a warm and deeply satisfying relationship although Oakley had quite a temper and did not spare her companion.

But on the other hand, money was always a problem. Oakley was a spendthrift, living extravagantly when she had the cash, not worrying about the uncertain future of mural commissions. Emerson was much more careful with money, and hated being in debt. There were some family dynamics at play there too. Her father was clueless and about money too and Emerson recalled that the only times she saw her mother cry was when she couldn’t pay the coal bill! So there were difficult times, with bills unpaid and creditors pressuring them. Eventually Oakley’s friends the Woodwards bought Cogslea and Lower Cogslea and she paid only rent for the rest of her life.

Violet Oakley’s archival collection is held at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. However you also conducted research at The New York Public Library. Which aspect of your research brought you here?

The Emerson family papers. The NYPL has Edith Emerson’s pressbooks, daily diaries and many family letters. It is a treasure trove of an amazing family (some descendants of the colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards). Emerson’s father was a famous archaeologist who spent most of his career at Cornell and her mother a classical pianist who taught at Wellesley. Edith’s uncle moved to Japan and she followed him there for a year. She also accompanied an artist, Helen Hyde who had lived many years in Japan, to Mexico. Incredible experiences for a single woman in the early 20th century!

Edith Emerson was certainly dedicated to Oakley, in fact she had a hand in preserving her legacy and advocating for her work even after her death.

Yes, she established the Violet Oakley Memorial Foundation, which bought back Lower Cogslea from the Woodward family. For twenty years the foundation continued Oakley’s legacy, hosting speakers, artists, dancers and musicians. Emerson was generous to scholars interested in Oakley’s work and she lent many works to the 1979 retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, still the largest ever devoted to Oakley’s life and art.

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As Dr. Van Hook mentions, the Emerson family papers contain much more than just documents related to Edith Emerson's life at Lower Cogslea. The diaries, correspondence, photographs, and memorabilia across the collection cover a century and a half of this international family, and are open for research. For questions about incorporating this or other archival resources into your research, click on the “Contact the Division” tab at the above link.

In addition to the material discussed here, there are several examples of Violet Oakley’s work across the Library’s research collections. There are also many resources about the worldwide tradition of mural painting and decoration.