The Red Rose Girls: Violet's Financial Woes

"Portrait of Man in Profile, Head of
League of Nations Association, Chicago"
by Violet Oakley

"Violet Oakley needed a commission. The seemingly inexhaustible sum received in payment for her murals at the Capitol had all been spent. For the first time in her professional career, no assignment arrived in time to save her from serious financial problems. As the twentieth-century art establishment became concerned with self-expression and abstraction, she found it difficult to garner important assignments, but Violet was not about to be thwarted. 

She immediately found a new project to interest her, in spite of the fact that she had no patron for the work. That same year, she and Edith rented out Cogslea and traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to document the beginning of the League of Nations and draw portraits of the delegates. Violet was bitterly disappointed when the United States failed to join the League, for she felt the organization represented the culmination of William Penn's dreams, as well as her own. She also found no commercial outlet for the Geneva drawings. In 1933 she published them along with reproductions of the Harrisburg project in a privately printed book, 'The Law Triumphant.' Unfortunately, the revenues generated from the project failed to cover the production costs.

Over the next twenty-seven years, Violet published several books, accepted various mural commissions, completed a number of portrait commissions, and to help pay expenses started an art school, The Cogslea Academy of Arts and Letters, in her studio. The Depression, World War II, and the changing aesthetics of the twentieth century destroyed Violet's hopes for financial recovery. Eventually she was forced to rent the house and move into the studio, which was bravely named 'Lower Cogslea.' Unhappily, the bank foreclosed on the mortgage of the property. Violet and Edith, facing the mortification of eviction, were saved one last time by Mrs. George Woodward, who bought Lower Cogslea and rented it back to the two artists at a price they could afford."

To be continued

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