Portrait study of Huger Elliott

Object Details

Title:

Date:

1921

Artist:

Medium:

Graphite on onion skin paper

Dimensions

13 x 9 9 in.

Classification

Drawings-watercolors

Credit Line:

Gift of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2015

Description

[lower right in graphite]: Violet Oakley / 1921; [bottom left in graphite]: Huger [sic] ElliottUpon his appointment in 1911 as Director of the Rhode Island School of Design, Elliott married Elizabeth Shippen Green, taking her to Providence and thus breaking up the Red Rose Girls. The press made a scandal of the wedding, insinuating it as a cover of Elliott’s homosexuality, and that Oakley, Jessie Wilcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens were left at Cogslea bereft and distraught. Oakley denied the accusations and remained close friends of both. She made her portrait studies of Elliott upon the couple’s return to Philadelphia in 1921 when he was named Principal of the School of Industrial Art of the Pennsylvania Museum (now Philadelphia Museum of Art).

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The Violet Oakley Experience is funded by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
For her expertise and scholarship on The Violet Oakley Experience, Woodmere thanks Patricia Likos Ricci. The foremost authority on Oakley, she is the Director of the Department of Fine Arts, Associate Professor of the History of Art, and a member of the Women and Gender Studies faculty at Elizabethtown College.
Woodmere’s website infrastructure and the digitization of the Museum’s collection are made possible by the generous support of Lisa Kabnick and John McFadden.