The Red Rose Girls: The "Cogs"

"The Red Roses: Elizabeth Shippen Green, Violet Oakley,
Jessie Willcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens

"As the ties between the women intensified, they began to refer to each other as sisters and to call each other by pet names. Jessie Smith became Jeddy, Elizabeth Green, Liddy, and Henrietta Cozens, Heddy. They tried out Viddy, for Violet, but somehow a diminutive did not mesh with her solemn personality and increasingly volatile temper. She preferred 'Violet, Duchess of Oaks.' The four women also chose a common surname, dubbing themselves the 'Cogs' family: 'C' for Cozens, 'O' for Oakley, 'G' for Green, and 'S' for Smith. Their teacher and mentor Howard Pyle called them the 'Red Rose Girls.'

1902 brought several honors to the household. The Plastic Club Exhibition Committee offered them a three-woman show. Jessie Smith managed to accumulate an impressive group of thirty illustrations. Advertising work for Procter & Gamble shared space with book illustrations, numerous magazine illustrations, and the designs for the Bryn Mawr calendar. Elizabeth Green contributed her calendar illustrations, as well as magazine illustrations. Violet Oakley exhibited two covers for 'Collier's Weekly,' some charcoal drawings, and her designs for the All Angels' stained-glass windows and chancel decorations. The show lasted from February third to the fifteenth and garnered favorable reviews from the local press, which noted that, even though they lived and worked together, the three friends maintained their artistic integrity. As noted: 'In illustration Miss Green shows possibly the most originality, Miss Smith the finest finish and Miss Oakley the strongest decorative sense.'

The success of the exhibition was an important step in the careers of all three artists, but it was the move to the Red Rose Inn that filled them with optimism. Photographs taken just prior to the move capture their high spirits. In one staged tableau, the four women sit around a table covered with beer mugs and wine bottles and hold up glasses filled with milk. In another the three artists, wearing the smocks they used for painting, are posed in front of Violet's poster design for the Plastic Club exhibition. Each grasps a long-stemmed red rose as Henrietta Cozens, holding a fourth rose, raises a watering can over her friends' heads."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Red Rose Girls: Art and Love on Philadelphia's Main Line" by Alice A. Carter.)