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Governor's Grand Executive Reception Room, Pennsylvania State Capitol, "The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual"
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Study for "Penn’s vision," Panel 11, from the mural series The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual, Governor's Reception Room Pennsylvania State Capitol[?]
Study for "Penn’s vision," Panel 11, from the mural series The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual, Governor's Reception Room Pennsylvania State Capitol[?]

Study for "Penn’s vision," Panel 11, from the mural series The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual, Governor's Reception Room Pennsylvania State Capitol[?]

Governor's Grand Executive Reception Room, Pennsylvania State Capitol, "The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual"
,
Harrisburg, PA

Object Details

Title:
Study for "Penn’s vision," Panel 11, from the mural series The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual, Governor's Reception Room Pennsylvania State Capitol[?]
Date:
1902–6
Artist:
Medium:
Watercolor on paper
Dimensions
12 ¾ x 10 ¼ in.
Classification
No items found.
Credit Line:
Gift of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2015
Description

[bottom right in graphite]: MH-331AWilliam Penn was Quaker, but he did not found Pennsylvania for Quakers. His vision was that of a state in which any person could practice according to the dictates of their own beliefs. In Oakley’s mural "Penn’s Vision," Penn leads an exodus of persecuted people to a fleet of ships that will take them away from England and to a haven in the New World. Pennsylvania would be a state of diverse faiths because Penn established laws forbidding the disruption of peaceful religious practices. For Oakley, this was Pennsylvania’s intellectual contribution to the United States’ Bill of Rights. A sunrise and sketchy depiction of leaping dolphins bode well for the journey to Pennsylvania.

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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.