Study for Cosmopolitan Club bookplate (Beatrice Griffith, model)
Date
1941Medium
White pastel on black paperCredit Line
Gift of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2015Dimensions
5 x 4 in.Description & Inscriptions
The Cosmopolitan Club of Philadelphia, a private club for socially prominent women, was established in 1928 and housed in an Art Deco building designed by architect Edmund Gilchrist and interior designer Jules Buoy at 16th and Latimer Streets. _x000D_
_x000D_
Oakley was a member and, in 1941, she was asked to compose a bookplate for the club. In the final version she evoked a cosmic dimension with a star-studded sky above a silhouetted skyline across the Schuylkill River. The Philadelphia Museum of Art can be discerned on the city’s acropolis to the left, and the PSFS building and City Hall tower can be identified on the right. Three contemporary women gather at a platform with a large terrestrial globe in a stand. The woman on the left wears an academic gown and holds a large book emblematic of education. The woman on the right sketches. The woman at center caresses a globe with one hand and raises the other in a rhetorical gesture, as if to say the whole world is now “woman’s sphere.”_x000D_
_x000D_
Oakley was a member and, in 1941, she was asked to compose a bookplate for the club. In the final version she evoked a cosmic dimension with a star-studded sky above a silhouetted skyline across the Schuylkill River. The Philadelphia Museum of Art can be discerned on the city’s acropolis to the left, and the PSFS building and City Hall tower can be identified on the right. Three contemporary women gather at a platform with a large terrestrial globe in a stand. The woman on the left wears an academic gown and holds a large book emblematic of education. The woman on the right sketches. The woman at center caresses a globe with one hand and raises the other in a rhetorical gesture, as if to say the whole world is now “woman’s sphere.”_x000D_
