To the memory of Selby and Dorothy Clewer, English Quakers, guardians of my British childhood, who lived the Quaker rule that there is of God in every human being

 

William Penn, 1644-1718, English

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American

 

Woodmere, the museum in Philadelphia of the art of its metropolitan region mounted an exhibition in 2017/18 of the work of  Violet Oakley, the first woman in the US to receive a public art commission.  The subject on which she decided for this commission was the legacy of William Penn to the North American polity: the conception and execution of The Holy Experiment  (1681).

 

I reissue this post to mark Woodmere’s permanent housing in its new Francis M. Maguire Hall of some of its large treasury of Violet Oakley’s work.  Its own research it made available online in 2017.

 

https://woodmereartmuseum.org/the-violet-oakley-experience/

 

I reissue this also as a comfort that there are several philosophical strands in the ideas and execution of governance in North America.  The Holy Experiment is one even if its ideals have been pushed into the deep background at this time.  The experiment was based on:

 

Quaker belief in religious tolerance;

Quaker belief in the God-given equality of all human beings;

William Penn’s idealistic belief in world government. It was in Violet Oakley’s time that the International Court of Justice was established at the Hague (1945).

 

Woodmere itself translates an ethic of human thriving into its programs and its exhibitions and is an institution in direct lineage of William Penn’s ideals for Pennsylvania.

 

Woodmere has also taken forward Violet Oakley’s commitment to the role of art as a spiritual tool to the ends of communal, human thriving. 

 

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The focus of Woodmere’s exhibition in 2017  – A Grand Vision:  Violet Oakley and the American Renaissance – was the effort of one woman to use the Holy Experiment to show how a nation divided and crushed by civil war  (1861-1865) could move to heal itself. 

 

 

 

 William Penn, facing the state, back to the Delaware River, atop Philadelphia’s City Hall, completed 1901. 

All its statuary was created by Alexander Milne Calder, 1846-1923.

 

 

 

The Holy Experiment of 1681***

is the plan devised by the Quaker, William Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania, for its governance. 

 

It remained in force in Pennsylvania until the Republic was established in 1776. 

 

 

Seal of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. 

Brandywine Museum and Conservancy, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

 

 

The Holy Experiment, which comes out of mainstream (Nonconformist) Christianity, is rare as an organizing principle for political and governing institutions.

 

Violet Oakley took her belief from the Holy Experiment.  She believed that tolerance, peace and social justice are a legacy to the US and the world. 

 

In 1922 Violet Oakley presented to the Library of Congress her historical narrative, with gilt illumination and calligraphy, of the application of the Holy Experiment not just to the establishment of Pennsylvania but also to the American Revolution and the Civil War. 

She did this during the Washington Conference on the limitation of armaments.

 

 

A copy in the State Capitol, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania  of one of an edition of 1000. It is subtitled ‘A Message from Pennsylvania to the World’.

 

The painting below represents the idealized image of the principles of the Holy Experiment.  It is one of more than 60 painted by the artist.

 

 

Peaceable Kingdom, 1834, oil on canvas. 

Edward Hicks, 1780-1849, American. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

Edward Hicks, born an Anglican in Pennsylvania, became a Quaker preacher and painter in Philadelphia.  There on the left is William Penn, making treaties with American Indians:  treaties which were oral and are said never to have been broken by reason of the principles of the Holy Experiment.

 

 

Peaceable Kingdom, 1975, ceramic

William Daley, American, 1925-2022. Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

 

The Quakers are celebrated as much for their values as for their techniques, in the tradition of British empiricism, to transform values into action.

 

For example, in 1758, leadership of the Quaker community was barred to slaveholders.  In 1778, Quakers who held slaves were disowned.  Under Quaker influence, slavery was banned  in 1780 in Pennsylvania in a program of partial emancipation of the children of slaves born after 1780.

This was 85 years before the emancipation of slaves in the US.

 

 

In Philadelphia itself, a bricks-and-mortar example of value-into-action is the Jesuit church of Old St. Joseph.  

 

Built in 1734 at a time when no Roman Catholic churches were allowed in on British territory, it is hidden in a courtyard with only a simple, off-street cross to note its presence.

An American eagle guards the statue of St. Joseph to one side of the altar.

This church in the oldest part of Philadelphia is testimony to the survival for a significant time of the principles of the Holy Experiment.

 

 

Old St. Joseph, Society Hill, Philadelphia

 

 

While the Holy Experiment passed away in 1776 as a plan for government, certain of its values remain in place in Philadelphia.

 

The placement in 2017 of Martin Puryear’s Big Bling is an example of the Philadelphian sensitivity as it concerns the ideals behind the state’s founding.  (It was New York’s fate to have been founded as a commercial colony.)

 

Commissioned by Madison Square Park, New York, it was on temporary loan to Philadelphia in 2017 pending renovations of its New York home.

It was placed along the right bank of the Schuylkill River, its head turned away from the business and administrative center of the Quaker city.  

 

 

The Big Bling, 2016, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, Philadelphia; 

pressure-treated laminated timbers, plywood, fiberglass, and gold leaf.  40 foot high

Martin Puryear, American born 1941. 

Loaned to Philadelphia in 2017 by the artist, Matthew Marks Gallery, and Madison Square Park Conservancy, NY

 

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The US Congress, having been established in Philadelphia, stopped meeting there in 1800 and the power passed to New York.  

 

The ideals of the Holy Experiment were submerged with the economic rise and rise of New York, expansion westwards from sea to shining sea, the continuing destitution of native Americans and the mounting of an attempt at separate statehood by the South fueled by slave-generated wealth. 

 

While the particularities of Pennsylvania’s political and religious foundation faded in a vast new American tapestry, it remains part of the common wealth of the United States.

 

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Violet Oakley

Violet Oakley painted the values-into-action in Pennsylvanian  history of the Holy Experiment: the establishment of a state founded on the idea of religious liberty and tolerance incorporated into law.

 

Violet Oakley further extended this idea to what she saw as possibility of these values for the outcome of  the Civil War; and to the international arena:  everything, she believed, should be done to achieve international peace by using law and not arms.

 

 

Violet Oakley’s was a self-actualized life. 

Raised an Episcopalian, she joined the Christian Scientists to whose dynamic founder, Mary Baker Eddy, she was attracted along with the centrality within its teaching of the divine feminine.

 

 

 

 

 

It was her fortune to have been born and raised in a family of at least two generations of artists.  She studied both at home  (New Jersey) and at the Art Students League in New York; and in Paris in 1894 with, among others, Edmond Aman-Jean. 

 

Aman-Jean’s poster for the second Rosicrucian salon in 1893 in Paris represents, in the figure of Beatrice, the Rosicrucian belief in the spiritual potency of art, an idea which infused Violet Oakley’s work and is a guiding principle of Woodmere.

 

 

 

Detail of Beatrix, c. 1892-893, a lithograph made for the second salon of  Rosicrucian art, Paris.  Aman-Jean, 1858-1936, French. 

Loaned by Barbara Liebowitz Graphics, NY to the Metropolitan Museum, NY in 2017

 

 

 

Beatrice and Dante, a study for part of a stained glass creation, Beatrice and Dante, c. 1904-5. 

Violet Oakley,  1874-1961, American.  The Drexel Collection at Drexel University.  Photograph by Daniel Morran.

 

 

It is an early consequence of the Holy Experiment that the second Rosicrucian settlement in North America – one of a wave of European pietists – came in 1694 to live not far from Woodmere on the banks of the Wissahickon river.

 

 

 

Details of Self Portrait, ANA diploma presentation, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 1920. 

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  National Academy Museum, New York on loan to the Woodmere Museum 2017

 

 

She had the advantage – for a term in 1896 – of training by Cecilia Beaux, one of the finest portraitists of her day.

 

Before moving, for lack of funds in the wake of family disaster, to Drexel Institute (now University) where, 1896-1897, she had the further fortune to be trained by Howard Pyle, the premier illustrator of the time.

 

Violet Oakley was only the second woman – the first being her teacher, Cecilia Beaux – to have taught (mural arts, between 1912 and 1917) at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

 

Violet Oakley, against significant odds and not a little hostility from men, supported herself exclusively as an artist.  

 

Even though she became assimilated to a wealthy and progressive socio-economic class and to live in that part of Philadelphia which has the distinction of being the oldest (race) integrated part of any American city (Mt. Airy, Philadelphia), the courage that it took for Violet Oakley to invite Edith Emerson to live and work with her in partnership, cannot be underestimated.

This was 1918.

 

 

 

Portrait of Edith Emerson Lecturing, 1935, oil on canvas  

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

 

Edith Emerson, 1888-1981, was an artist, teacher of art history,  curator, and the director of Woodmere from its establishment as a museum in 1940 to 1967.   She was the archivist and keeper of Violet Oakley’s work.

 

 

 

The Calling of Elisha, 1920, oil on canvas. 

Edith Emerson, 1888-1981, American. Woodmere, Philadelphia

Edith Emerson made this design for a synagogue in suburban Philadelphia. Elijah on the left acknowledges Elisha on the right.  The two are to be joined forever. 

This painting is a metaphorical rendering of Edith Emerson’s relationship with Violet Oakley.

 

Their partnership survived from 1918 to Violet Oakley’s death in 1961.

 

 

 

Portrait of Violet Oakley, oil on canvas.  Date unknown. 

Edith Emerson, 1888-1981, American.  Woodmere, Philadelphia.

Behind her head is a copy of Il Convivo

 

 

Il Convito (The Banquet):  Edith Emerson in page costume with Guests.  Date unknown, oil on canvas. 

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Edith Emerson as her alter ego, ‘Giovanni’, serving her mistress, ‘Violetta’.  This painting celebrates the completion of the murals for the Senate Chamber in the Pennsylvania State House.  

 

 

Murals for the Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg

 

It was Violet Oakley’s talent which brought her in 1902 to the attention of those people who appointed her to furbish the Pennsylvania State Capitol – the Governor’s Executive Reception Room, Supreme Court, and Senate – with murals. 

 

A work of 25 years, worked discontinuously from 1902-1927, in a total artistic career of 50 years. 

 

The choice of Violet Oakley in 1902 as muralist for the Governor’s Executive Reception Room gave her the opportunity to enlarge her reputation.  Her appointment  and the fees she received – the first for a woman for such a large commission – was widely commented.  

 

She chose for the Governor’s Executive Reception Room the theme of the founding of Quakerism during the crisis of the English Reformation. 

 

 

 

A view of the Governor’s Executive Reception Room

 

 

The Senate’s theme – murals completed in 1919 – was Unity and the Creation and Preservation of the Union from the time of the American Revolution through the ending of its Civil War. 

 

 

 

Unity (detail), Senate Chamber, Pennsylvania State Capitol. Photograph by Darryl Moran

 

 

Violet Oakley at work in the Senate chamber, State Capitol, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

Image from the web of an original, photographer unknown, in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

 

 

 

 

A view of the Senate Chamber, Harrisburg. Image from the web

The central frieze, International Understanding and Unity, Supreme Manifestation of Enlightenment.  

The woman in blue is a female impersonation of the Waters of Life from whom flows the sacred waters to nourish all the world.  She also is making reference to female suffrage.

An inscription on the panel with a passage from the Apocalypse says:

“He carried me away to a great and high mountain and shewed me the Great City and he shewed me a pure river of Water of Life as crystal proceeding out of the throne.

The Leaves of the Tree were for the Healing of Nations.”

 

 

For the Supreme Court – whose murals were dedicated in 1927 – she chose as theme an allegorical view of the evolution of the law. 

 

This she represented as a movement up a musical scale beginning with the Divine Law from which she believed that all law flows.  She continued with the law of nature and with international law.

The law was for William Penn the supreme ideal.

 

 

 

A view into the Supreme Court, State Capitol Building, Pennsylvania.

  Image courtesy of Darryl Moran, 2017.

 

 

 

All 43 murals created for the Capitol cannot be appreciated except in the flesh and in the paint. 

They are friezes which tell stories, richly illustrated, accompanied by calligraphic scripts. 

A few panels  cannot suffice to tell the stories Violet Oakley told.  But here are few of her images. 

 

Her work covers the walls of each chamber in different historical styles.  English historical tableaux, gilded Renaissance, and in illuminated manuscript form.

 

 

 

William Penn, student at Christ Church, Oxford, 1660.

State Capitol, Harrisburg.  Image courtesy of Darryl Moran, 2017.

 

 

 

Penn’s Vision, State Capitol, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

Image courtesy of Darryl Moran, 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Slaves of the Earth Driven Forward and Upward by their Slave Driver 

 Image of Darryl Moran, 2017.

 

 

 

George Washington Marching Through Philadelphia, 1777

  Image of Darryl Moran, 2017

 

 

 

George Washington at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia  Image of Darryl Moran, 2017

 

 

 

Divine Law, Love, and Wisdom, Supreme Court Chamber

Image of Darryl Moran, 2017

 

 

 

Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863 

 Image of Darryl Moran, 2017

 

 

 

One of the many subpanels which surround the large panels of Violet Oakley’s murals. State Capitol, Harrisburg

 

 

 

 

Commissions

While working on her murals for the State Capitol building, Violet Oakley received many other commissions:  mural work in private houses and institutions, stained glass, illustration and portraits.

 

 

 

Detail of a Portrait of Houston Woodward,  1922, oil on canvas. 

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  On loan by the subject’s family to Woodmere in 2017

 

 

 

 

The Pearls (Portrait of Mrs. James Crosby Brown (Agnes Hewlett) and Son, Alexandre), 1911, oil on canvas. 

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  Private loan to Woodmere in 2017

 

 

Irish Woman (Miss Amy Cryan), date unknown, oil on canvas  

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  On loan from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to Woodmere in 2017

 

 

 

 

Portrait of Sarah Ruth Wood Ferguson (1890-1969), oil on canvas board, 1943

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Private loan to Woodmere in 2017

 

 

 

 

Albert Spalding, American violinist, 1929, oil on canvas

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

 

 

 

Andrei Gromyko (1909-1989) Delegate from the USSR to the United Nations, 1946, black and white conte on bluff paper.

 Later Soviet Foreign Minister, 1957-85;  Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 1985-1988.   

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

Violet Oakley lent her support and weight both to the League of Nations and to the United Nations.  These, for her, were important as institutions founded to use the law for the establishment and maintenance of peace.

 

 

 

 

Alice in Wonderland, c. 1920s, oil on canvas

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  On loan from the Free Library of Philadelphia to Woodmere in 2017

 

 

 

June, 1902, oil, charcoal and graphite on composition board 

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

 

 

 

Mrs. Wasserman, pastel on black paper, early 20th century

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia from its website

 

 

 

W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, c. 1928, pastel on brown paper  

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

 

 

 

Study of Goliath for World War II diptych of David and Goliath for the Military Chapel in Indiantown Gap, 1945-46, pastel on paper. 

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

 

 

The Wise and Foolish Virgins, stained glass lancet windows originally for St. Peter’s Church, Germantown, Philadelphia, 1908-1909.

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American.  Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

The story is from the Gospel of St. Matthew and is about being prepared for judgement day.

 

 

Stained glass permanently installed in Woodmere’s new Frances M. Maguire Hall for Art and Education in November 2025.

 

 

Digital print of a stained glass created by the Nicola d’Ascenzo Studio of a design by Violet Oakley for the library of a private house.  A replica replaced the original, destroyed in an accident.

 

The Museum notes says that the stained glass asks the question:  how is wisdom found?  And answers it: with a moral compass to guide a life.

 

 

Two of three large murals originally created for a private house are below.  All three were permanently installed in November 2025 in Woodmere’s new France M. Maguire Hall for Art and Education.

 

 

 

This is a scene to represent the flowering of Mankind.  The pianist is thought to be Leopold Stokowski whom Violet Oakley drew often when she attended the Philadelphia Orchestra.

 

Youth and Arts detail from the mural The Building of the House of Wisdom, 1910-11, oil on canvas.

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

The child, helped by the works of the Ancients, Cicero, Dante, Confucius and Solomon, is on his way to maturity.

 

The Child and Tradition from the mural series The Building of the House of Wisdom, 1901-11, oil on canvas. 

Violet Oakley, 1874-1961, American. Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

 

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Just as the the Holy Experiment has been overshadowed by later developments, Violet Oakley’s artistic oeuvre was overshadowed in short order by the evolution of art.

 

Her high romantic style, cousin to that of the British pre-Raphaelites and to European continental Symbolists, her idealized portraits,  and the instructional nature of her work began to run counter to the artistic innovations of modernism from 1875 onwards. 

 

Violet Oakley’s masterwork, the murals in the Capitol Building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania were begun in 1903, nine years before the Philadelphian Albert Barnes bought his first two Matisse paintings from Leo and Gertrude Stein.

They were completed in 1927, fourteen years after that honorary Philadelphian, Marcel Duchamp, had his nude descending her staircase to flee into the fractured modernity in which we live.   

 

 

We should probably add to the reasons for her eclipse the increasing secularism of our society and the evolution of identity politics.  Her work may be unreadable for those who know little about Christianity. 

Identity politics have alienated many from a Euro-centric narrative of the founding of the American State. 

In short, Violet Oakley speaks a language foreign to many, if not the majority, today.

 

Violet Oakley’s work, as the Woodmere director, Bill Valerio, noted in 2017, and for the reasons just stated, has not found its place in the American canon. 

 

Woodmere took the occasion of its 2017 exhibition to create a catalogue for this show: a fulsome inventory and exploration of the artist’s thought and work, placing it in its historical and art-historical context.

 

This context is the era immediately after the end of the American civil war when American creatives effected an American Renaissance – architecture, murals, international exhibitions, painting, and social movements – with which they hoped to revive the nation.

 

 

The catalogue cover is a detail of Man and Science from the mural series, The Building of the House of Wisdom, 1910-11, Woodmere, Philadelphia

 

 

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My whole life, Violet Oakley said, has been about peace.

 

Violet Oakley’s enabling idea came  from William Penn’s Holy Experiment:  the efficacy of using tolerance and peaceful means to resolve the problems of the world.

 

 

Violet Oakley then advanced further into her times with the message that tolerance and peace are more effective than force and bloodshed. 

An ideal to which, more than ever, we hold.

 

***The Holy Experiment from the website of Quakers in the World

A new approach to governance: William Penn was the ’Absolute Proprietor’ of Pennsylvania, under the Royal Charter. That meant he could do as he chose, provided he paid the King an annual rent (2 beaver skins and 20% of any gold or silver).  However, Penn believed that government should be

Free to the people under it, whatever be the frame, where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws

 

In 1682 Penn set out the first version of Pennsylvania’s Constitution in the ‘Great Law’. In 1683 this was augmented, in the ‘Second Frame of Government’. When he returned to Pennsylvania in 1699 it was revised to become the ‘Charter of Privileges’.

This remained in place until the War of Independence, in 1776.

The key features of all these documents were:

Freedom of religion: all could worship freely, as they chose. Pennsylvania would be open to people of all religious persuasions, not only Quakers. 

An enlightened penal code; prison was to reform, not only to punish.  People in prison were to be taught a trade, so that they could be gainfully employed on release, and they were to be treated humanely. The death penalty was to be confined to murder and treason. In Britain at the time many relatively trivial offences incurred the death penalty and prisons were terrible places.

Work for everyone: he made occupations in agriculture, crafts and trade much more accessible than elsewhere. Pennsylvania became known as “the best poor man’s country.”

Education for everyone: girls and boys were all to be educated. This was a remarkable innovation at a time when most children were illiterate, especially girls. And the education was to be useful, and practical, so that all could find employment. This was characteristic of Quakers in Britain too.

A widened franchise: all men were to be given the vote. Equality did not extend to giving women the vote, but in England only a small proportion of men could vote, namely those owning property. There was no mention of slaves or ‘Indians’ however.

Town planning for healthy living: he designed Philadelphia on a grid pattern, with wide public squares and parks. He had seen the ravages caused by the Great Plague in London, and the fire that followed, and he was determined that his ‘greene countrie towne‘ would be healthy and safe. This approach to design was later emulated all over America.