Violet Oakley

1874-1961

Unlike so many other illustrators, Violet Oakley’s family was mostly artists. Consequently, she did not have to struggle to gain permission to study art and as a young girl in Bergen Heights, New Jersey, she was encouraged to attend the Art Students League, which she followed a year later with trips to Europe.  With two grandfathers members of the National Academy of Design, she described her infatuation with illustration as “hereditary and chronic.”

In 1896, Violet Oakley returned to the USA and enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but within a year she changed her focus and left for Drexel Institute to study under Howard Pyle. It was while at the Drexel Institute that she met her beloved companions, illustrators par excellence Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jessie Willcox Smith. Like Maxfield Parrish she attributed the Pre-Raphaelites as a great influence on her style as well as Howard Pyle, whose contributions to her career are not unsung. Pyle immediately recognized her talents, her sense of color and composition and her deft handling of large-scale artworks. He felt that her greatest ability was in large-scale works and encouraged that pursuit although it would mean few illustration commissions. Ms. Oakley may have been the only illustration student whose work Pyle admired but that he encouraged to go in a different direction-other than illustration. He continually attempted, wherever possible, to get her commissions for large-scale murals and stained glass windows and he was successful and Oakley got such commissions. Yet, she always did illustrations whenever the opportunity loomed.

Violet Oakley completed one of her most significant commissions in 1902, ‘The Creation and Preservation of the Union’ which consisted of a series of large murals for the walls of the Governor’s Reception Room in the State Capitol Building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  The extraordinary working studies for the murals were issued in a portfolio as limited edition art prints, they are illustrations by definition.  The finished paintings were a magnificent expression of Oakley’s fondness for history and the talent she had honed through years of struggle as a pioneering female illustrator in a mostly male-dominated profession. Elements of historical accuracy are merged eloquently with sturdy skills acquired under the tutelage of Howard Pyle. The commission took four years during which she also did some illustration work from time to time.

In 1911, Edwin Austin Abbey died while working on other aspects of the same project, and she was awarded his work as well. During the next 19 years, she completed the murals and also illustrated six illuminated manuscripts, and a book on the murals. A committed artist of great integrity, she documented her works well, had numerous exhibitions, and worked up until the day she died in 1961.