The Red Rose Girls: Violet Oakley, Pt. 2

Violet Oakley

Study for "Abraham Lincoln
Delivering the Gettysburg Address"

"Violet Oakley grew up in Bergen Heights, New Jersey, the youngest of three sisters. Her mother had cast aside her own professional ambitions when she married, yet she encouraged all three of her daughters in art, and they spent many hours sketching. The young Violet had an eye for detail and was careful with her drawings. Although her early drawings were cheerful and unconstrained, her childhood was not entirely free from care. She suffered from both asthma and extreme shyness. 

When her older sister was sent to Vassar College, Violet stayed home, studiously copying the Old Master engravings that both her grandfathers had collected on their numerous trips to Europe. When she was twenty years old, her parents finally felt secure enough about her health and permitted her to begin her formal art education. She accompanied her father on the early train to New York City and attended classes at the Art Student's League, where she studied with Irving R. Wiles and Carroll Beckwith.

In the winter of 1895 Violet's family went to Europe to visit her Aunt Juliana's family in France. Violet and Hester seized the opportunity for art instruction. The sisters were admitted to the Académie Montparnasse to study with Edmond Aman-Jean and Raphael Nevin. The atelier was the typical all-female class: a mixture of the serious student and the dilettante, the ambitious and the merely bored. Violet plunged into her studies and was captivated by the Parisian aesthetic and the graceful paintings and posters of the Art Nouveau movement. That summer the sisters traveled to Rye, England, to take a class with Charles Lazar, the artist Violet credited for helping her conceptualize her paintings. 'Work it out alone,' Lazar told her. 'Work it out with yourself and Nature.'"

To be continued

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