Edith Emerson

Edith Emerson, artist, teacher, and curator, was born on July 27, 1888, in Oxford, Ohio. Her father, Alfred Emerson, was an archaeologist and professor of classical archaeology. Her mother, Alice Edwards, was a concert pianist and music professor. Edith had three siblings: Gertrude, editor of Asia Magazine; Alfred Junior, an entomologist and professor of zoology; and Willard, a banker.

Emerson’s training as an artist began at age twelve with lessons from Norwegian painter Olaf Branner, professor of drawing and watercolor in the College of Architecture at Cornell University. Three years later, she began taking courses at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), where she studied with John Vanderpoel and Thomas Wood Stevens. In 1911, Emerson visited Japan, where she met American printmaker Helen Hyde; the two women traveled to Mexico together the following year.¹

Emerson claimed to have first met Violet Oakley on a lantern slide when she oversaw the slide collection at the AIC. News that the famous female muralist would be teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts brought her to Philadelphia in 1912. She remembered Oakley as “an electrifying teacher” who “abolished any sense of inferiority” in her women students.² Emerson thrived with Oakley’s instruction. She won Cresson Traveling Fellowships in 1914 and 1915, the Second Toppan Prize, a mural competition to decorate the Little Theatre, and a position as Oakley’s studio assistant in 1916. They developed an intimate friendship and, in 1918, Oakley invited Emerson to live with her at Cogslea. For the rest of their lives, they maintained a public relationship as a couple.

As an artist, Emerson continued to follow her mentor. She assisted Oakley with the murals for the Senate Chamber and the Supreme Court Chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, painted the stenciled ceiling of the Italian living room in the Vassar College Alumnae House, and helped with the chronological trees in the Great Women of the Bible mural series at First Presbyterian Church in Germantown. Emerson received a commission to design the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial stained glass window for Keneseth Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia in 1919, but after World War I, the demand for mural decoration declined and she focused on painting. From 1927 to 1929, Emerson and Oakley attended sessions of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and made portrait drawings of the delegates and dignitaries that they exhibited together. They traveled throughout Europe and set up studios in London and Florence. During World War II, they both produced portable altarpieces for the Citizens Committee for the Army and Navy. In 1948, Emerson traveled alone to India to illustrate her sister Gertrude’s book, The Pageant of India’s History.³

Emerson’s career included writing occasional magazine articles about art and travel, and teaching art history at the Agnes Irwin School, the Museum School of Industrial Arts, and Chestnut Hill College. In 1947, she became curator and then director of Woodmere and for thirty years focused on exhibiting the work of contemporary regional artists.

Emerson was responsible for preserving Oakley’s history and legacy. When Oakley died in 1961, Emerson published an autobiographical article chronicling their lives together.⁴  She established the Violet Oakley Memorial Foundation to preserve the artist’s studio, works of art, and personal papers. For twenty years, the foundation held cultural programs in the studio at Cogslea that were open to the public. In 1979, the foundation collaborated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a retrospective exhibition of Oakley’s work.⁵  After Emerson’s death in 1981, the foundation was dissolved, and the contents of Oakley’s studio were distributed to museums and the Archives of American Art. Woodmere now owns the largest collection of works by Oakley. In recognition of Oakley’s contributions to the state, a Pennsylvania historic marker was placed in front of Cogslea in 1998.

¹ Bailey Van Hook, Violet Oakley: An Artist’s Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016): 216. Van Hook provides an extensive account of the relationship of Edith Emerson and Violet Oakley.

² Edith Emerson, “Violet Oakley 1874–1961,” Part 1, Germantown Crier 13 (December 1961): 19.

³ Gertrude Emerson Sen, The Pageant of India’s History (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948).

⁴ Edith Emerson, “Violet Oakley 1874–1961,” Part 1, Germantown Crier 13 (December 1961): 7–9, 19–26; Part 2 Germantown Crier 14 (March 1962): 13–15.

⁵ The Oakley retrospective was curated by Anne d’Harnoncourt and Ann Percy. Patricia Likos, “Violet Oakley (1874–1961).” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 75, No. 325 (June 1979): 1–32.