Sarah Lawrence College

Violet Oakley had a long and influential relationship with the founding family of Sarah Lawrence College, who lived in Manhattan and Bronxville, New York. Louise Lawrence was the roommate of Hester Caldwell Oakley (1871–1905), Violet’s sister, at Vassar College in the class of 1891. After Hester’s death, Oakley maintained her friendship with the Lawrences, painting portraits of Louise and her parents, William Van Duzer Lawrence and Sarah Bates Lawrence.

In 1909, after the success of the pageant celebrating the anniversary of William Penn's founding of Philadelphia, Mr. Lawrence immediately recruited Oakley to organize a pageant for Westchester County, in Bronxville. He encouraged Oakley to join the upscale residential community he was developing in Bronxville and, in 1910, the artist hired New York architects Carrère and Hastings to build a Tudor revival house and studio for herself and her mother in Lawrence Park West. But a new commission to decorate the Senate Chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol in 1911 prevented Oakley from relocating to the new residence.

When Sarah Bates Lawrence, an advocate for higher education for women, passed away in 1926, the Lawrence family founded a women’s college in her name in Bronxville and asked Oakley to design the seal. Although the seals of women’s colleges were typically coats-of-arms or mythological figures with mottoes in Greek or Latin, Oakley rejected this approach and designed the seal in the style of a coin with a portrait of the head of state. Mrs. Lawrence is drawn in profile encircled by the inscription: “Sarah Lawrence College 1926” and the motto “Wisdom with Understanding.” Oakley’s design was adopted as the official seal of Sarah Lawrence College in 1927.