All Angels Episcopal Church, "The Heavenly Host," Chancel Murals, "The Ascension," Design for Mosaic Reredos

Violet Oakley was just one of many women illustrators working in the twentieth century until an opportunity at All Angels Church in New York transformed her career. In 1899, Caryl Coleman left Tiffany Studios to open his own business, the Church Glass and Decorating Company. He soon secured a major commission to decorate All Angels, an Episcopal church on the corner of 81st Street and West End Avenue designed by J.B. Snook & Sons in the English Gothic style. Impressed with the Epiphany stained glass window that Oakley, who was then his apprentice, had designed, he made her the principal designer of All Angels’ chancel decorations in 1900. The scale of the project was daunting, particularly for an inexperienced artist: a glass mosaic reredos of The Ascension, two monumental apse murals of The Heavenly Host, and lancet windows of saints with guardian angels. Coleman, who was an ecclesiologist, supervised the iconographic program.

The Ascension was a standard Christian theme represented by illustrious artists for centuries. Rather than a monumental Baroque-style mural of Jesus soaring into the heavens, Oakley designed a static, earthbound composition. Jesus is depicted frontally in a shroud-like white garment, his arms extending toward the viewer as he begins to levitate above the kneeling disciples. The Ascension reredos was attached to a white marble altar carved by Oscar L. Lenz with sculptures of Archangels Gabriel and Michael and fronted with a mosaic of the Agony of the Garden by Furio Piccirilli. The altar harmonized with the showpiece in the church, Austrian sculptor Karl Bitter’s white marble frieze of angels playing musical instruments on the choir rail and pulpit, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For the three lancet windows, Oakley chose personifications of the theological virtues Faith, Hope, and Charity. The pose of the woman in Faith clearly derives from Edward Burne-Jones’s figure of Hope. A nocturnal scene of a woman holding a lamp lit by a hovering angel, Faith anticipates The Wise and Foolish Virgins, later designed by Oakley for Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church. Hope is illustrated by the gospel narrative of Peter Raising Dorcas from the dead, a subject the artist reprised in a mural in Great Women of the Bible at First Presbyterian Church. Charity is represented by the philanthropic work of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. In 1978, when All Angels Church was deconsecrated and scheduled for demolition, Oakley’s stained glass windows were auctioned as the work of Tiffany Studios. Their current location is unknown.

For the curved wall of the apse behind the altar, Oakley painted two murals on canvas, each fifteen feet by seventeen feet, of The Heavenly Host. Composed entirely of figures arranged in tiers to represent a choir of angels, it included musical instruments, symbols, and colors prescribed in Coleman’s guide, A Brief Description of the Celestial Hierarchies. To prepare for painting the fifty over-life-size figures, Oakley drew from live models, one of whom was allegedly the femme fatale Evelyn Nesbit, who posed for the scarlet-winged Seraphim. The Heavenly Host lit up the white marble church interior in a blaze of color that wowed the critics in 1901. The Church Standard said, “The harmony of the color treatment is most excellent; the sentiment or feeling throughout the entire memorial is most reverential.”¹ The Philadelphia Press praised the murals not only for their “grace, sweetness, and serenity,” but also for their “force.”² The New York Herald Tribune declared the chancel an “artistic triumph.”³ The Heavenly Host was awarded the silver medal in mural decoration at the Saint Louis Exposition in 1904. The Heavenly Host murals were torn when they were removed from the apse walls in 1978; it is not known whether parts of these large canvases survived.

At All Angels Church, Oakley had demonstrated that at age twenty-seven she could handle the aesthetic and physical demands of mural painting. A year later, Philadelphia architect Joseph M. Huston offered her a commission to paint a mural series in the Pennsylvania State Capitol.

¹ The Church Standard, January 4, 1902, 376.

² Philadelphia Press, December 8, 1901.

³ “Memorial to Dr. Hoffman Artistic Triumph,” New York Herald Tribune, December 30, 1901.