WOMAN IN ART
Some years ago three girls with art ambition arranged for a studio together. It was in a beautiful place, "The Red Rose" at Villa Nova, Pennsylvania, a fine old house surrounded by fine old trees and lovely gardens. There they fitted and furnished their studio, and engaged Mr. William Sartain to give them painting lessons. He came once in two weeks for the lessons and the valuable criticisms which they found most helpful. In time they entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, working faithfully because of their object in view. On graduation they had ready sale for their pictures, and orders came also. Perhaps the varying orders pointed to the directions which their art eventually pursued.
Miss Jessie Wilcox Smith and Miss Elizabeth Shippen Green were led into the path of designing and illustrating. Before long Violet Oakley received an order for a subject that needed a first-hand knowledge of historical places and costumes of the bygone times, so with her mother and her sketch book she visited Spain, Italy, and England, as a further preparation for her life work. Her previous study with Mr. Howard Pyle was of great benefit, for he is an illustrator who illustrates. All this preparation was unknown to the general public until a finished work (six designs of the whole number assigned to Miss Oakley) was put on exhibition in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
The Capitol Building at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had been destroyed by fire and rebuilt on a larger and more magnificent scale. The building committee arranged to beautify the interior in a manner appropriate to the use of the building and to the honor of the state. For that purpose the committee selected a number of our best artists for the scriptural and mural decorations, namely: Edwin A. Abbey, John W. Alexander, Violet Oakley, George Gray Barnard, Harrington Fitzgerald, W. B. Van Ingen, Roland H. Perry, and Henry C. Mercer.
To Violet Oakley was given the commission for thirteen panels for a frieze (of heroic figures) in the governor's Reception Room. For that series of murals she took for her subject "The Founding of the State Spiritual." They represent the triumph of the growing idea of true liberty, in the holy experiment of Pennsylvania. Six panels were first completed. First, the dawn of the idea of religious tolerance is embodied in an unequal diptych eight by thirteen feet, representing William Tyndale at Cologne printing his translation of the Bible into English, and the smuggling of the New Testament into England. The second panel portrays the burning of the books
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