Woodward Family

George and Gertrude Woodward were Violet Oakley’s most important private patrons and some of her closest friends. They became acquainted in 1906 when George, the primary real estate developer of the new suburbs of Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy in northwest Philadelphia, hired architect Frank Miles Day to renovate a nineteenth-century farmstead as a residence and studio for Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Henrietta Cozens after the Red Rose estate they had been renting in Villanova was sold. Known as Cogslea (a name formed from the initials of the women’s surnames), the property was located in West Mount Airy on Saint George’s Road, a street presumably named for their benefactor; Cogslea would remain Oakley’s home for the rest of her life. As a tribute to the Woodwards’ chivalrous rescue of the artists, Oakley designed a tile overmantel depicting Saint George and Saint Gertrude as a knight and lady for their new home, Krisheim, built nearby in 1910. Wealthy, generous, and socially progressive, George was a member of the Octavia Hill Association, which provided affordable housing for impoverished immigrants in Philadelphia. He also served as a Pennsylvania state senator from 1919 to 1945.

Oakley was already nationally famous when she met the Woodwards, having just completed the murals for the Governor’s Grand Executive Reception Room in the Pennsylvania State Capitol. The couple arranged commissions for her to design murals in Chestnut Hill Academy’s Henry Memorial Library in 1907 and stained glass windows in Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in neighboring Germantown in 1908. Oakley made many portraits of the Woodward family, including posthumous likenesses of their son Henry Howard Houston Woodward (1922), a pilot who died in World War I in 1914, and their daughter Quita Woodward (1939), who died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1934, shortly after graduating from Bryn Mawr College. Over the years, Oakley’s friendship with the Woodwards deepened. In the spring of 1928 they traveled together through North Africa, Sicily, and Greece, a journey that Oakley recorded in a series of sketches.