Red Rose Girls Collection

Jessie Wilcox Smith (1863-1935) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest daughter of middle-class parents, Katherine DeWitt and Charles Henry Smith. She held a short-lived career as a kindergarten teacher but struggled with the physical demands of the job. After being persuaded to attend an art lesson taught by her cousin, Smith enrolled in the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia in 1884. She continued her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts until 1888, when she left to pursue a career in illustration. For the next several years, and throughout her artistic career, Smith was regularly commissioned to create advertising illustrations for various magazines, including the Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, and Scribner’s. Beginning in 1894, she studied at the Drexel Institute under the foremost American illustrator of her time, Howard Pyle (1853-1911), which was formative in her development as an artist and illustrator.

Among Pyle’s other students were two additional young female artists, Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954) and Violet Oakley (1874-1961). Green was born into a well-connected Philadelphia family, and was exposed to art early on through her father, Jasper Green (1829-1910), an artist himself whose career took off when Elizabeth was a teenager. Like Jessie Wilcox Smith, Green attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and after graduating, illustrated newspaper articles and magazine advertisements. In 1897, she began taking courses at the Drexel Institute with Pyle, a transformative experience in both her art and personal life.

The final part of the trio, Violet Oakley, was born to a family of artists in Jersey City, New Jersey. She began her formal art education at the Art Students League in New York City in 1892 and afterward spent time in Europe studying under French portraitist Raphaël Collin. After returning to the United States, Oakley attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts until 1897, when she enrolled in the Drexel Institute to study with Howard Pyle. Oakley’s new mentor helped steer her toward stained-glass work and large-scale art, which became a primary focus throughout the rest of her career. Most notably, she designed and painted the mural in the Governor’s Reception Room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and after the death of fellow muralist Edwin Austin Abbey, completed his unfinished murals in the Senate Chamber and Supreme Court Room of the Capitol Building, which took Oakley over 19 years to complete.

The three female artists shared a close friendship after Pyle paired Oakley and Smith together to work on a book commission for Evangeline (1897). In 1901, the three women began living together in the Red Rose Inn in Villanova, Pennsylvania, joined by their friend Henrietta Cozens, where they became known as the “Red Rose Girls.” In 1905, they moved to Chestnut Hill to a home they named “Cogslea,” where they lived until 1911 when Green married artist Huger Elliott and moved with him to Rhode Island. While the three women went on to pursue and gain acclaim for different types of artistic work – Smith became famous for her graceful depictions of children, while Green worked under contract with Harper’s and traveled throughout the East Coast, and Oakley took on more murals and large-scale works – they remained influenced by each other throughout their careers.