Red Rose Girls
From 1902 until 1906, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Elizabeth Shippen Green lived as an extended family at the Red Rose Inn in Villanova. The three artists met in 1897 when they were studying with the famous illustrator Howard Pyle at Drexel Institute. After renting studios at 1523 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia for four years, they decided to pool their income and lease the Red Rose estate, a restored eighteenth-century farmstead, which had recently been purchased by Anthony J. Drexel. The communal household, consisting of Oakley and her mother, Green and her parents, Smith, and Henrietta Cozens, a horticulturist and mutual friend of the artists, made it possible for them to live in picturesque surroundings on the Main Line.
Economic experiments in collective living were cropping up throughout the Philadelphia region in the early twentieth century. Inspired by News from Nowhere, a socialist utopian novel published in 1890 by the English Arts and Crafts advocate William Morris, American artists were forming collectively owned villages and art colonies. In 1900, architect William Lightfoot Price and sculptor Frank Stephens established the single-tax artists’ village of Arden in New Castle County, Delaware.1 The following year Price founded Rose Valley, a colony in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where illustrators Alice Barber Stephens and Charles Hallowell Stephens resided. The Red Rose estate was restored to serve as an artists’ community by Frederic Philips, who inherited the farmstead from his father, Moro Philips, a wealthy chemical manufacturer.2 But illustrator A.B. Frost was the only artist to live there before Philips sold the property to Drexel.
The Red Rose art community of Oakley and her colleagues was unusual in that it was established entirely by women. The unique arrangement attracted favorable attention from the press and promoted the artists’ rising careers.3 Pyle began to refer to his former students as the “Red Rose girls.”4 The Red Rose idyll ended abruptly in 1906 when Drexel sold the estate. Fortunately, the artists were able to relocate the entire household to a colonial farmstead in West Mount Airy on property owned by George Woodward of Chestnut Hill. Renovated by architect Frank Miles Day, the new estate was called “Cogslea,” a word formed from the initials of the four women’s last names, and an allusion to the familiar metaphor of industrial laborers reduced to serving as cogs in the wheels of machines. The Cogslea community remained intact until 1911, when Green married Huger Elliott and moved out. Oakley purchased the entire estate in 1912 and enlarged the studio to accommodate her latest commission with the Pennsylvania State Capitol. Smith and Cozens built “Cogshill” on adjacent property. Smith and Elliott eventually returned to the area and built the residence “Little Garth” nearby.
1 George E. Thomas, William L. Price: Arts and Crafts to Modern Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); Mark Taylor, Arden (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2010).
3 Mary Tracy Earle, “The Red Rose,” The Lamp 26 (May 1903): 275–84; Patricia Likos, “The Ladies of the Red Rose,” Feminist Art Journal 13 (1976): 11–15, 43; “The Red Rose Inn: La Vita Nuova,” The Tiller 1 (33): 23–26; Bailey Van Hook, Violet Oakley: An Artist’s Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
4 Alice A. Carter, The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.
