Krisheim and the Woodward Family
Dr. George Woodward and his wife, Gertrude Houston Woodward, played a central role in Violet Oakley’s life as patrons, benefactors, and friends. Woodward, the real estate developer of the new Philadelphia suburb of Chestnut Hill, offered to renovate an abandoned farmstead near Cresheim Creek for Oakley, illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green, and a mutual friend and horticulturist, Henrietta Cozens, when their lease expired at the Red Rose Inn in Villanova in 1906. Architect Frank Miles Day, who was engaged in the restoration of Independence Hall, rebuilt the nineteenth-century farmhouse in the Colonial Revival style with formal gardens and redesigned the barn as studio space for the artists. The estate was called Cogslea, an acronym formed from the letters of the women’s last names. Cogslea was Oakley’s home and studio from 1906 until she passed away in 1961.
The Woodwards began to commission Oakley soon after she relocated to the area. In 1907, George Woodward, a member of the board of directors of Chestnut Hill Academy, arranged for her to paint a mural in the Henry Memorial Library of the private boys’ school.
The following year, Gertrude Woodward commissioned Oakley to design a double stained glass window at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Germantown. In 1911, Oakley designed a ceramic tile overmantel as a gift for the Woodwards' new Tudor Revival house, Krisheim, built by the Boston architectural firm of Peabody and Stearns on the opposite side of the Cresheim Creek from Cogslea. Playing on the theme of Saint George and the Dragon, she portrayed a medieval knight on horseback subduing a reptilian beast at a stone-ringed pond that resembles the one in the garden at Cogslea, located on Saint George’s Road (presumably named for George Woodward). But instead of Saint George rescuing a damsel in distress, he is accompanied by a lady on horseback striking the beast with a lance. Inscribed “S.S. George and Gertrude,” the haloed figures suggest Oakley’s perception of the Woodwards as her patrons. The colorful pictorial tilework was produced by Enfield Pottery Works, an Arts and Crafts workshop a short distance from Chestnut Hill, and was featured in the October 1913 issue of Art and Progress magazine.
Oakley became an intimate friend of the Woodwards and made many drawings and paintings of their children, including posthumous portraits of Henry Howard Houston Woodward (1922), who perished in World War I in 1918, and Quita Woodward (1939), who died from Hodgkin’s disease in 1934. She recorded her travels with George and Gertrude in Morocco in watercolors in 1928.
